One of our newer thinkspace members, Browsium, was written up in the WSJ and is getting a lot of press for it’s product Unibrows. I was talking with Gary Schare, President & COO, about what his company does and what his product is. Gary told me that his product UniBrows “delivers complete IE6 functionality and behaviors by using the original, native IE6 rendering, JavaScript, ActiveX and security design”. While thinkspace is not running any legacy applications, I can think of a lot of companies that I’ve worked for in the past that could use his product.
When a large company makes a significant investment in a mission critical web-based application I can see how they would be very hesitant to want to upgrade their desktop computers throughout the entire organization to the latest and greatest browser because it would break their application. Thus, we have millions of computers out there still running IE6 and XP. I looked at my Google Analytics and 2.9% of my Internet Explorer website traffic is still using IE6. That’s pretty damn annoying to be honest. I wish that number were zero. The reason is because I know the thinkspace website does not render perfectly in IE6 and therefore it is not providing my website visitor with the best experience. The problem for me is the time it would take to troubleshoot it to make it look perfect. Anyhow, I think their product is a wonderful solution for those companies that want to upgrade their desktop operating system environment but haven’t been able to do so because of their legacy applications that are tied to IE6. I think the entire web development community would also be happy if IE6 would just go away!