By the time you read this, Microsoft will have released its latest web browser, Internet Explorer 9, to an adoring public. IE 9 is a truly advanced browser, with useful and exciting new features for end users that place a special emphasis on the websites they visit. And it even has some important security enhancements, such as tracking protection and an ActiveX filter that will be welcome in many business environments.
Businesses, however, might feel a bit let down by IE 9 overall. And that's because IE 9, like IE 8 before it, does nothing to address the one browser issue that still dogs many corporate sites. That is, it doesn't address the IE 6 compatibility issue.
While Microsoft can be somewhat excused for focusing on big ticket consumer features in IE 9, it's a bit unclear how the company has left this gaping hole in its migration strategy for its key demographic for so long. In Windows Vista and 7, for example, the company shipped dramatic application compatibility improvements. But it also left browser compatibility completely untouched, a factor in Vista's lack of traction with businesses and, to this day, IE 6's surprisingly strong hold on businesses after a decade in the market.
This success—well, longevity—can be tied back directly to the early 2000s, when IE 6 had a 90 percent stranglehold on the browser market. Back then, targeting IE 6 with intranet, extranet, and websites wasn't just common sense, it was pretty much the only viable option. And so in an agewant when businesses were moving online en masse, they were doing so with IE 6.
In retrospect, coding for IE 6 was a mistake as this browser turned into a security and web standards nightmare. But who could have foreseen a future in which Microsoft essentially abandoned browser development for years, leaving IE 6 as its only option, a time during which a new breed of competitors arose, first Firefox and then later Chrome?
Microsoft has been making up for its missteps in the browser market for years now, but it's never really addressed the business site compatibility issue. Instead, it relies on big, complex and expensive virtualization solutions, such as Application Virtualization (App-V) and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), to get customers over the hump. These are decent solutions for a variety of needs, but if what you want is simple IE 6 compatibility, they're overkill.