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Comment by drusenko | Hacker News Reader

The Digg survey shows that 70% of IE6 users are corporate, but there's no indication how representative that is of the web as a whole.

Either way, this initiative is targeted straight at those users. We've heard from several sources that many corporate IT departments don't feel any need or urgency to upgrade, and receive very few complaints. We see this as a start -- the more complaints the IT department gets (especially from on top), the more pressure they'll feel to upgrade. Even if they can't upgrade IE 6 due to legacy applications, they could always install a version of Firefox side-by-side and only use IE 6 for the legacy apps.

For the other subset of IE6 users (moms, grandmothers, etc), this will be a great notice to let them know that their web experience is seriously degraded, and that they should strongly consider upgrading their web browser.

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Unfortunately, IT departments receiving complaints isn't going to do it, unless those complaints are "I can't do my job with IE6 any more"... So you need to hit core web apps for those businesses. If the choice is "we could fix our 78 different custom web apps to work on Firefox" or "we could upgrade to IE8 or FF", the choice is pretty clear for a cash-crunched business with an understaffed IT department. It's a cost-benefit thing.

For what it's worth, we don't support IE6 (or if we do, it's accidental!) and we're pretty squarely aimed at businesses and "prosumers". So count us in!

Having consulted to big companies in a former life, I just don't think it'll do much good. :-(

It's as good a place to start as any. Once we can get the percentage of users using IE 6 down a little bit more, we'll be able to ditch support completely.

Also, there's no reason the browser decision has to be binary: custom legacy apps could use IE 6, with Firefox as the main web browser.

BTW: Shoot me an email when you've implemented some kind of notice and I'll throw your logo up!

There's a slight problem with this (and I'm only half tongue in cheek here): corporate IT admins probably see it as an actual positive if their staff can't access their favorite social networking web sites or anything else not explicitly required for work. The only thing that will convince them to move is if critical business infrastructure they depend on starts breaking and that isn't very likely to happen soon.

I think one of key things that will make businesses move will be when Microsoft itself phases out mainstream support. Sadly, their policy is that IE lifecycles follow that of the OS they were released with, so if I read it right, we are looking at IE6 being supported right through to 2014 before security updates disappear. That means we'll probably be stuck with some reasonable percentage of IE6 users for a few years yet. With luck Win7 will be good enough to entice a lot of companies that held back through vista to upgrade and that will kill off a goodly number over the next year or two.

Really not trying to be snarky here, but I don't think too many grandmothers are using weebly or reading reddit.

Sorry, there may not be too many grandmothers reading reddit, but our userbase is very much non-technical.

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