Alireza Sefati Blog

Technology - I am really tired of testing my code in multiple IE versions simply because there are still some people out there who use IE 6 or even earlier IE versions to surf the web. IE 7 has been around long enough for people to upgrade but ofcourse there are those who don’t pay attention to the latest update all the time. And as the result, they make life harder for us web developers.

I am working on this project currently. I have spent a good portion of my alloted time unit testing and fixing IE 6 bugs which our company still supports. The page renders fine in IE 7 and FireFox 2. It even renders OK in Mac’s Safari but IE6 is all messed up. It is like you can’t write clean CSS code for IE 6 without putting lots of hacks in there. And I hate CSS hacks.

Currently Microsoft doesn’t even allow unlicensed users to upgrade their IE from 6 to 7 and there are many people who are running unlicensed version of MS windows XP. The reason for that is that Microsoft wants to force them to purchase an authorized copy of XP but that strategy is not working. PC users are not going to spend ton of money to purchase an old OS just to be able to use IE7. So they end up not using it at all. And who gets punished here? The web developers such as me.

So I propose Microsoft use their power and kill IE 6 permanently and make life easier on web developers.