The Company Blog

When we designed and built Incite Keystone we were aware that Internet Explorer 6 accounted for around 30% of our users. Due to this we have spent a lot of time customising the user interface to make it IE6 compliant – a lot of time. It occupies our designers, our front-end development teams and also our testers. This week we made a decision to not actively support IE6 anymore and talk to our customers about reasons to upgrade to IE7, IE8 or Firefox.

I could discuss how old IE6 is (8 years!!) and how you don’t have any other software on your computer that is 8 years old. I could also discuss the numerous security/vulnerability issues in IE6 however this would probably be construed as spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). So instead of that I decided to try and present an argument based on straight speed. After all you’re the person using Incite Keystone all day. You more than anyone would understand that if you could reclaim some of your valuable time, that would be awesome.

So I looked back across our logs and decided to build a virtual machine that matched the majority of our users. Windows XP accounts for 76% of our users followed by Windows 7 (9%) and Windows Vista (8%). Yes the Windows 7 result is interesting. As for browsers IE7 makes up 46% of all browsers and IE6 accounts for 26% and IE8 18%. It is this 26% of our IE6 users that need the speed! We use javascript extensively as do all other Web 2.0 applications. So javascript execution speed is important for the overall speed of the Keystone application.

I built a Windows XP virtual machine with 512MB of RAM, 1 CPU, IE6 and Firefox 3.5.4 and tested the browsers against the Webkit Javascript Benchmark. Follow the link to do some testing yourself and compare.

IE6/512MB RAM #1 - 72921.4ms

IE6/512MB RAM #2 – 65049.4ms

IE6/512MB RAM #3 – 77139.8ms

FF/512MB RAM #1 – 1167.8ms

FF/512MB RAM #2 – 1297.4ms

FF/512MB RAM #3 – 1177.4ms

Bank some daily time savings and move away from IE6, but should you move to IE7 or IE8?

When I tested IE7 and IE8 they were 1.39 times faster (46902.0ms) and 12.1 times (5383.6ms) faster than IE6 (respectively). But note still not even close to Firefox. When you compare FF to IE8 it is 4.15 times faster.

When I say we won’t be actively supporting IE6 it doesn’t mean we will try and break things, just that we won’t be testing IE6 against Keystone release versions from now on – so mileage may vary. However despite this I think this blog post alone and your own testing will prove to you that it is time to break up with IE6 and move on.