Microsoft should release IE6 as a single-site browser

8/09/2009

Internet Explorer 6 is still out there. In large numbers.

Often the reason given is that the corporate sector is tied to it through intranets and other applications that rely on it.

So, why not release IE6 as a single-site browser (SSB), like Mozilla’s Prism for example?

  1. Corporates can run their intranets via the IE6 SSB
  2. The general-use browser can then be updated to the latest version (IE8), which has to make security easier for their IT department
  3. Microsoft can then officially drop support for IE6, and only need to support the SSB in its corporate environment
  4. The rest of us can breathe a sigh of relief as we watch IE6 usage fall rapidly!

It seems like a simple solution to me, but perhaps it’s not that simple. Otherwise Microsoft would have done it already. Yes?

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There is 1 comment in this article:

  1. 9/09/2009ThePengwin says:

    Its enteriely possible to make your own single site browser with the help of the MSHTML component and Visual Basic. I have done so to make help documentation in a project a lot easier.
    However to upgrade the browser, I guess you would still need to have IE6 somewhere in the machine as a standalone component to prevent a new IE overriding the IE6 components… I doubt all system admins will have the perseverance to maintain such a project when they already have a simple, already there solution.
    I think the people who have changed have changed, the ones who havent probably wont, but in the end when XP comes to its end of life and Microsoft dosent support it, that is the only time when we will see the true end of life to IE6.
    Finally, is it really that much effort to make a web based app HTML complaint?

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