Internet Explorer 6; will this thing ever die?! Now 9 years old – and superseded for almost half that time – it remains the bane of web developers’ lives the world over. Even YouTube and Google have jumped on the anti-IE6 bandwagon but the browser people love to hate remains the cockroach of the nuclear fallout that is standards-compliant ire.
There have been glimpses of hope and reports of it waning into obscurity but these appear to have been lies, damned lies, and statistics, at least in my corner of the world - Asia. Last week Webdesigner Depot told the story as it really is with a great post titled Will the Real Browser Stats Please Stand Up?
The post drew a series of data from StatCounter which showed that although IE6 was taking its last gasp in the US and Europe, it still had plenty of life left in it in Asia and was positively the picture of good health in China, the most populous - and one of the fastest growing - nations in the world.
How can this be? How, in the information super-age where everyone is interconnected and browser software flows freely, can a region with half the world’s population be so far behind? Because thar be pirates!
Yes, it’s the new iPhone 4. No, I didn’t camp outside Apple all night, there’s nothing wrong with the signal quality and yes, I hold it any damn way I like!
