Microsoft actively urges IE 6 users to upgrade,and I certainly agree! Continuing to support IE 6 in any modern web application can be a major headache. I have seen a number of display, JavaScript and other issues that will only occur on IE 6. My company currently tests our software on IE 6-8, Firefox 3 and many of the developers use Google’s Chrome browser (although not officially supported by Qualtrax yet.)

IE 6 has an intolerably slow JavaScript engine, which only adds to our frustrations at having to continue to support this browser. Qualtrax 4.0+ utilizes a great deal of JavaScript in order to make the site more responsive and to lessen load on the server. With IE 6’s slow JavaScript engine the benefits of our approach are completely negated on the client side. IE 7 and 8 are quite a bit better in JavaScript performance then IE 6, however they are both quite slow when compared to Firefox and Chrome. Microsoft’s Windows President Steven Sinofsky has himself admitted that they need to do some more work on their JavaScript performance for Internet Explorer 9.I really hope IE9 will be a true competitor with regard to JavaScript performance.

Microsoft is specifically targeting the home users of Windows XP in their statements about upgrading. I would like to see more corporations upgrade their user’s machines as well. I know some of these companies have legacy applications that will not work correctly in IE 7 or above, which is their main reason for not upgrading.  For these companies I would highly recommend you at least test the application(s) in question in IE7 or IE8, or urge the vendor to fix the compatibility issues. I know this is not always possible and moving to a different system can be extremely time consuming and costly, but as time goes on you will find that more and more applications will stop supporting IE 6 (something I would love to be able to do) and you will find yourself in a tough situation.