Many have predicted the demise of Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) over the past years, with Microsoft even having launched a site wholly dedicated to watching its usage decline and trying to accelerate said trend (http://www.ie6countdown.com/). They have also made mention of the fact that they would prefer businesses phase out use of IE6 and are scheduled to cease providing support for it in 2014. Google is another company that decided to discontinue support for IE6 on YouTube along with some of their less popular services in March 2010.

Unfortunately at this point in time it is still around and nowhere more so than in the enterprise, in other words our business area. Its 10 year anniversary is coming up fast, so isn’t it time for businesses to move on? There are many reasons why they don’t, such as upgrade costs, the risks associated with such a major upgrade and the widespread use of bespoke internal systems that may only work in IE6. However, Microsoft has released three major versions of the browser since 2001, all of which added major new features alongside compatibility and performance improvements. They have even released two new versions of their operating systems, neither of which support IE6, so it does seem like high time to upgrade.

We have a major vested interest in this matter as it is one of the biggest things influencing our day-to-day development work and any future product development plans. The issue we face is that, in addition to the extra time spent making our systems look and behave correctly in IE6, there are some things we simply cannot do due to performance considerations which will therefore not make its way into our product, even when they would greatly benefit users. For certain functionality modern browsers are 100s of times faster than IE6 and this limits us when it comes to creating more dynamic and usable pages, making a web page more similar to an application one may install on a computer. In the coming years this gap is likely to widen significantly with the introduction of HTML5, a major step in the development of web based systems. This puts us in the tough situation of being caught between wanting to innovate and provide the best possible system to our clients, while also having to take into account what the majority of said clients can actually take advantage of.

Until companies upgrade in large number we simply cannot discontinue support for even parts of our system. Our statistics show that 89% of the usage we see by clients is done with IE6 (97% for all versions of Internet Explorer). One thing that puts this into perspective is the same statistic for candidates applying through our system, which is a more representative cross-section of general web users, though still with a slight bias due to people searching for jobs at work. In this group 56% use some version of Internet Explorer and only 10% use IE6.

We are hoping to see our client’s transition to more modern browsers in the coming years and once they do you can look forward to seeing some fantastic new features. However, until they do so in sufficiently large number we will have to live with the current state of affairs and continue to find clever workarounds as we have in the past, nowhere more so than in our upcoming ATS Version 4, which represents an interesting challenge in its own right.

-this is a guest technology post from a member of our development team, Nick Stephan.