Design:Choosing Firefox for IE6 Compatibility

A recent meet­ing to dis­cuss the require­ments for a new browser had a sur­pris­ing out­come. There are some key applic­a­tions that require Internet Explorer Version 6 and the com­pat­ib­il­ity modes in IEv7 and IEv8 don’t work. This has meant that the entire com­pany has been stuck with IE6 for the last five years.

Recently, a num­ber of import­ant busi­ness sites have stopped sup­port­ing IE6. You might think this is a good thing, how­ever, we have one set of users demand­ing IE6 to access their applic­a­tion, and another set demand­ing a mod­ern browser for other applic­a­tions. We can’t install IE7 or IE8 because they can’t co-​​exist with IE6. Once the upgrade is done, then we lose access the crit­ical applic­a­tion (yes, even with the back­ward com­pat­ib­il­ity, the leg­acy applic­a­tions are a problem).

Think Different

It struck me that we were not look­ing at the prob­lem cor­rectly. Why not think of IE6 as an applic­a­tion. That is, IE6 is the “cli­ent” for the leg­acy applic­a­tions, and then install Firefox for all other web access. Have both browsers installed on the machines and let the users choose the cor­rect one.

After a bit of stunned silence, we knew that this could work. We didn’t have to con­vince man­age­ment that we were repla­cing “Internet Explorer”, we are adding a new browser that solves our prob­lems and Firefox is the obvi­ous choice. No sup­port prob­lems, people who wanted to use IE6 could con­tinue to do so. Firefox would be gradu­ally adop­ted over time, so their would be no neg­aitve impact on the users. We expect the trans­ition to Firefox would also be gradual as people passed the word onto other users.

It’s one of the those times when you slap your­self on the head and say “why didn’t we think of it earlier?”.

The look on the faces of the Microsoft Admins was price­less, of course. Skewered on the fact of Microsoft’s pro­pri­et­ary “open” tech­no­logy. They couldn’t say no to using Firefox.

Result!

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