Microsoft to support IE 6 until 2014

[Old Marcus]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8196242.stm

Why can't they let it die? As a webmaster, I have given up supporting IE 6 on my websites now. If I come across a computer with it installed, I may check to see if the site works O.K. and doesn't look too awful, but beyond that, I can't be bothered with it.

Of course, the reason for this is that lots of businesses and government departments are either slow to upgrade, or have web based systems so tied into IE 6 that upgrading would break them.

Probably seems pointless posting a thread here, since I know that 99.9% of people here will just say "M$ sux use firefox", but let's give it a go.

Mind you, this is probably just an excuse for me to have a rant.

[pizza-is-good]

Alot of the non-microsoft haters, clueless about what open source means people I know know that IE just s****.
With no offense here to anyone, I have found in my experience that the only people that do not know that there is anoter option to IE, or that IE is not 'the internet', are liberal arts majors.

That said, why will Microsoft still support it? my guess is that because they are still making money on it. Why else? microsoft is a company and companies want money.

[adempewolff]

I use firefox for everything, so I am not speaking from much experience but:

Doesn't IE 6 not have tabbing support? When I do fresh installs of XP I'm always driven crazy by no tabs when I try to browse other sites while windows update and the firefox download complete

edit: "With no offense here to anyone, I have found in my experience that the only people that do not know that there is anoter option to IE, or that IE is not 'the internet', are liberal arts majors."

heyhey now, don't be hatin! I go to a liveral arts college and have an interdisciplinary social sciences major on top of that and I've met just as many people from science majors that are computer illiterate as from my major and other liberal-artsy majors. to the contrary a lot of art/humanities majors are very computer literate because of the software and networking tools available on computers these days. Sure there are fools, but I have a workstudy in for our IT department and I can vouch that some of my co-workers who are comp science majors know less about technologies than english majors I know.

exhibit a being a coworker who was telling me he used Vista for the support for larger quantities of RAM but he used the 32-bit edition of Vista...

[Old Marcus]

That said, why will Microsoft still support it? my guess is that because they are still making money on it. Why else? microsoft is a company and companies want money.

I fail to see how Microsoft are making money from it, It is available for free, and getting pretty obsolete now. Though, if they were to cut support tomorrow, I'm betting in 10 years time there will still be companies using it.

[pizza-is-good]

I fail to see how Microsoft are making money from it, It is available for free, and getting pretty obsolete now. Though, if they were to cut support tomorrow, I'm betting in 10 years time there will still be companies using it.

I don't know.... But they have to somehow, or else, why would they support it?
(That is how low my opinion of microsoft is)

Yeah, that's sad. Oh the ignorance of the world.....

[KiwiNZ]

They support it because a lot till use it

A good decision and good customer support

[MellonCollie]

They have to support it because that's how long XP is being supported.

[Barrucadu]

Somehow I don't think many webmasters will be supporting it for that long.

[dragos240]

XP has reached end of life.

[MellonCollie]

Extended support for XP lasts until 2014.