Microsoft has finally announced that they will be pushing automatic updates to IE8 for PC’s that are currently running IE6 or IE7 (more info here). This is great news, as I had a very long winded post already typed out (but not published) entitled “IE6 Needs to Die (or why IE8 makes me sad)”. I won’t go into great detail about the post now that I see Microsoft is being proactive with trying to upgrade older Internet Explorers.
I do have a helpful graphic for people that will be seeing the new Update to IE8 welcome screen. If you have any doubts about what to do on this screen follow my expertly crafted graphic instructions:
I know some folks are on intranets that have requirements for older versions of Internet Explorer, but I implore you to consider clicking the button. Here is some info from my unpublished rant:
“Now that IE8 has been released, something official needs to happen with IE6. It needs to reach its end of life… Microsoft should stop supporting it and encourage folks to upgrade. Why do I feel this way? Well, with IE8 and the latest Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome browsers, we as designers can finally strive for true table-less / w3c compliant design with good confidence that almost any modern browser will handle things pretty darn close to the same as its siblings. This is great… EXCEPT when you start to consider the various browser market shares. There are several different sites that provide these statistics and they don’t all agree on actual numbers, but most agree that IE6’s market share is still 18% – 20%! To put this in perspective, Firefox (2 + 3) is about only about 22% – 25%. This means that we as designers still cannot ignore IE6. This would be practically equivalent to ignoring Firefox, and no one would argue this. The amount of effort that goes into supporting non standards compliant browsers like IE6 factored across the globe I bet is quite significant.”
By clicking this button, you are in fact helping propel the interwebs towards a more standards based browser / platform neutral utopia. Do your part for human kind, Al Gore would be proud of you.