IE6 Market Share and Support
Internet Explorer 6 has long been considered the bane of many a Web Developer - now almost 10 years old, for much of its life it has dominated the market place. Unfortunately, at the time of its creation implementing interoperable cross-browser standards was of significantly smaller concern than it is now - following W3C implementation standards only truly became a major concern for browser makers several years later, with the increasing complexities involved in building and maintaining websites, and the release of competing browsers.
Internet Explorer 6 itself lacks support for many of the more advanced functionalities implemented by modern browsers, and has a buggy implementation of many others. Until recently, the browser's predominance has meant that a significant amount of time spent developing new websites has been concerned with accounting for IE6's inconsistencies, and coding features in an IE6 compatible manner. Some of its more irritating faults include:
- Poor CSS2 support, causing rendering and display issues without bespoke IE6 fixes.
- No support for transparent PNG images, one of the more useful tools for creating attractive websites.
- No support for XHTML, the language in which the majority of modern websites are coded.
- Significant security flaws, which were exploited in the recent attacks on Google and caused several governments to issue notices advising against the use of the browser.
- No support for HTML5, and other future web technologies.