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Question edited to meet new guidelines

I consider Netscape or IE5.5 to be irrelevant for the following reasons:

  • Market share is negligible
  • Mindshare is minimal - few developers still talk about the IE5.5 or Netscape problem and most web frameworks don't bother to support them.
  • They are not official supported any more, unlike Internet Explorer which is still supported by Microsoft.

How long do you believe it will be before these conditions are met?

In terms of supporting your answer, you may want to consider Microsoft announcements, the timeline for depreciating other Microsoft products and current rate at which IE6 market share has been declining. You may also want to discuss in relative terms, for example, how much you believe that market share will drop off a year after Microsoft stop support.

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*shootes IE6 with a rocket – TheLQ Sep 4 '10 at 1:10
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I suspect the only popular answer would be "not soon enough" :) – Gaurav Sep 8 '10 at 11:56
Only in your dreams... – Eric Sep 8 '10 at 20:01
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I would say that IE7 and IE8 is close to being as big a negative impact on www as IE6, so I'd love to know when IE6 - IE8 will be killed of. Here are some tricks that can make the wait more bearable: webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/2350/… - I'm looking forward to IE9 though. – mawtex Sep 8 '10 at 23:17
@Casebash: Can you edit this question to meet "Guidelines for Great Subjective Questions"? See: blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective – bigown Oct 1 '10 at 2:22
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15 Answers

up vote 12 down vote accepted

I don't know if it will ever be truly "killed off" in the sense that there isn't one in existence. There are probably still IE 4 and 5's installed and even used regularly. In the sense that we don't have to worry about supporting it anymore, that depends on your business; for some businesses, the number of potential customers browsing their website is so small that they've already stopped supporting it because it isn't worth the extra work.

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+1 I would add that Netscape is a good example of that. – DavRob60 Sep 4 '10 at 1:04
up vote 1 down vote

Define "killed off." A lot of companies don't support it now. On the other hand, it'll probably be another decade before we get to, say, less than 5k active installs in the world.

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It is really just waiting for the enterprise users to upgrade Windows and their web apps. Once that happens, life really is nice. I work on a private web app used internally at the London office of a multinational and we've gone from having IE6 being the majority of users to now being only 0.6%. See gist.github.com/380921 – Tom Morris Sep 8 '10 at 22:18
up vote 1 down vote

We made the call earlier this year not to support it anymore at my company. I work for a large retail website who gets millions of hits a day...

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up vote 0 down vote

Ohio State killed it off recently in their updated MCSS (minimum computing security standard) and now only supports Ie7,8 in the Internet Explorer bunch. As a web developer at OSU, this has made me a happy coder.

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Did that block internet for all IE6 users then? – Eric Sep 8 '10 at 20:02
No it just means that as far as employees go if you are using IE6 we will not provide desktop support. Additionally, I no longer have to really give a care to web applications functioning correctly in IE6. Desktop support group also during the win 7 rollout, pushed office 2007 to users who were on 2003 and also forced upgrade on any computer using XP to not use anything less than ie7. – Chris Sep 8 '10 at 20:30
up vote 3 down vote

In your mind it should be killed off when:

The work required to support IE6 outweighs the benefit to your company of supporting it.

Most likely it should be killed off in your mind already because the market share is small and the types of users that use it probably won't consume your products or services.

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Still need to support enterprise client :-( – Casebash Sep 4 '10 at 22:30
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This is the best answer because it touches on the real issue: YOUR users. If 0.5% of your users use IE6, its probably not worth it. If it's 50% of your users, you ought to worry about it more. – Matt Olenik Oct 2 '10 at 0:03
up vote 4 down vote

The problem is Microsoft will continue to support it while government departments have it as SOE, and the government departments will have it as SOE until Microsoft stop supporting it.

Honestly, I'd say another three years before XP REALLY starts to die, unless Google actually turns off its page for IE6.

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What do you mean by SOE? – Casebash Sep 8 '10 at 5:55
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Why is XP's death relevant here? – Eric Sep 8 '10 at 20:01
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Because IE6 is the browser that ships with XP and it isn't available in more recent versions of Windows? – Gelatin Sep 8 '10 at 20:29
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Gotta agree with this one - if Microsoft didn't create such an EPIC FAIL with Vista IE6 would have been well on the way to being dead by now – Jaco Pretorius Sep 8 '10 at 21:38
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SOE = Standard Operating Environment – MIA Oct 1 '10 at 23:19
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up vote 1 down vote

When you finally pry it out of your users' cold dead hands.

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up vote 6 down vote

My pessimistic view? As long as Windows XP lives, so too will IE6.

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Microsoft will terminate support for XP on 08/04/2014 – Casebash Mar 18 '11 at 0:33
Thanks for the link and the exact time frame. As Gaurav said above, "not soon enough". – kush Dec 11 '12 at 14:43
up vote 0 down vote

IE6 has around 7% of the browser market. If it makes sense for your company to implement an IE6 version (instead of new features etc.) to gain 7%, it's not dead to you.

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up vote 0 down vote

I just left a job for a healthcare sector SaaS company. 90%+ of the clients had IE6 as their standard still and most of those actively prevented their users from using anything else. The huge majority of our page hits came from IE6. We were partnered up with some other firms and my contacts at those other firms said they saw the same thing.

Unless the hospitals suddenly have an epiphany that they should move to Win7, I doubt we're going to see a big jump away from IE6 anytime soon.

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They'll have a need to move off XP eventually. – David Thornley Oct 26 '10 at 22:00
how many websites do hospitals really go to though? Unless your business is strictly related to them, I wouldn't worry. – Johnny Quest Jul 12 '11 at 17:40
up vote 0 down vote

Along with XP. And I think XP will be irrelevant in 3 years.

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up vote 0 down vote

I think it is safe to say that if Google has stopped catering to the IE6 community then so should everyone. ...and that was over 9 months ago!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6#Market_share

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If only it were that simple. Unfortunately, my company has critical legacy software that only runs on IE6, so we can't just drop it. Also, it is a huge undertaking to test the hundreds of other apps that our users rely upon with more a recent browser. As a result, our entire user community of over 4,000 users is stuck on IE6. – Kramii Oct 26 '10 at 20:06
@Kramii so you are the cause – Johnny Quest Jul 12 '11 at 17:43
@Johhny: I like to think so! But seriously, my (now ex-)employer has made huge steps in the right direction since I commented in October. They will move off IE6 - just not yet. – Kramii Jul 12 '11 at 20:28
up vote 0 down vote

When websites take the difficult choice and start to drop support for it.. good work youtube

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up vote 0 down vote

I stopped caring about IE6 a while ago. Microsoft does't support IE6, Google Does't support IE6. Ocasionally I'll hop into IE6 to check that they layout doesn't explode but I don't care much past that.

I beleive XP had an update long, long ago that updated IE6 to IE7. So even Microsoft tried to kill off IE6. The only way IE6 is going to go away is if you stop carring about it unless you absolutly have to.

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up vote 0 down vote

From my experience, I would say roughly 5 years from now depending on your industry. A recent project of mine involved a website used by hospitals, and the number of them still using IE6 is staggering, and I would imaging this is the same for other large, legacy system-encumbered organizations. Some of our customers are trying to upgrade and move away from IE6 but they have so many old applications that require it that the process gets delayed until those legacy applcations are updated or replaced.

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