Time to Update Your Browser

The vast majority of schools still use Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) despite this being a browser with well known security vulnerabilities and is essentially 7 year old technology. Worldwide, IE6 still commands a 29% share of the browser market, but the figure in education is likely to be much higher (anecdotally, more than 90%). This is largely down to schools not spending time and money on what is perceived to be a non-essential upgrade. Typically, schools will only move to Internet Explorer 7.0 (IE7) when they purchase new kit or undertake major network upgrades. Any computers in schools purchased before September 2006 are still likely to have IE6 on them.

It's high time that this changed and schools updated their browsers across their networks:

• Ian Billups, technical director of Incerts reckons that his development team spend a significant amount of time dealing with IE6 compatability issues everytime they update their system. "We could spend that time much more profitably in developing new features", commented Ian ruefully.

• Another web company has chosen to ignore IE6 completely. Quikmaps is a really excellent educational site (see here for ideas on its use) that won't work in IE6. And this is only going to become more common.

• Users that persist in ignoring recent browsers will also be suffering significant performance loss. Ian Billups again points out that in tests their software runs at least 50% faster in Firefox than in IE6, and in some functions can be a massive 400% slower! Interesingly, he also reports that IE7 is also significantly slower than both Firefox and Safari.

• Paypal have just announced that they will start to actively block service requests from users using old and highly insecure browsers. One can only surmise that others will follow suit.

So, it's time to do your favourite website providers a favour and give IE6 the old heave-ho and upgrade to a more modern browser. By sticking with IE6 your school systems are more vulnerable to attack and you are missing out on potentially large performance gains.

• Firefox download
• IE 7 download
• Safari download
• Opera download

 

Comments

[James Watson]

I understand today that the Wordpress admin control panel is broken in IE6 and won't or can't be fixed (don't have a link, I'm afraid).

However, is there anyone who has their own Wordpress blog still using IE6??

[John Sutton]

Hi James,

Thanks for yout comment.

Do you know which version of Wordpress this refers to? I’ve got a few schools using Wordpress MU and IE6 is overwhelmingly their popular browser – working fine at the moment but was going to upgrade them to the new Wordpress release in the next few weeks. Might hold on and investigate!