1. It’s old.
2. It’s outdated.
3. It doesn’t support new technology.

What does this mean? It means that it’s a  pain for developers, and that means an increased charge for you to have us work around it. So, we do have some mutual interest in you upgrading your browsers regularly.

I totally get that some firms have invested a lot of money in certain technology. Upgrading that technology might not be financially viable.

Those people probably aren’t your target market anyway, unless you’re a “B to B” business. Still, I don’t believe that IE6′s market share of 9.6% are government workers, or people browsing websites at work. The relatively newer IE7 has 11%, while the newest version of Internet Explorer, IE8 has 14.7%.

Why is the market share for IE almost evenly spread throughout it’s 35.3% (down almost 1% from January) market share? I’ll tell you why. Because IE doesn’t encourage you to upgrade your browser.

I logged on with Firefox the other day, and I got this message asking me to download version 3.6. Note that it doesn’t require you to update if you don’t want to, but it does tell you why you should: It’s faster, more secure, with thousands of add-ons. As a bonus, it lets you do all of that in one easy click of the mouse. In less than 5 minutes you’re updated. You can even browse the web while it downloads in the background.

Aside from the visual and security updates, what’s important for web developers are the back end updates that come along with upgraded browsers. Features that support new technologies like CSS3 and HTML5 make coding your site easier. They help your website to load faster and more efficiently, in the long run helping your online sales or business to grow.

Microsoft doesn’t do this. Microsoft makes you find the update, download it, and install it. That’s why we still have 20% of users using outdated browsers. That’s why most (awesome) web designers hate Internet Explorer.

So, do yourself a favor. Switch to Firefox. When you notice that the web is a lot prettier and loads faster, you’ll leave me a comment and thank me for my advice.

A screenshot of our website in the Adobe Browser Lab.

I’m talking about a tool that makes it easier to troubleshoot the peekaboo bug, three pixel text jog, double float-margin bug, and the myriad of other browser bugs that plague web developers. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking… BORING! But hear me out here. When we develop websites, we start by making sure it looks perfect in Firefox, which is the most standard-compliant browser available. Ok, I think Opera has it beat, but it is not used much in the United States. But seriously, you have to be a REAL geek to use Opera. Next we look at it in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), which is the most widely used web browser. Unfortunately, this is where things start to go wrong. It’s not usually catastrophic, but it does require some attention. When we start to look at it in IE 6, a thorn in all web developer’s side, this is when the real headaches start. In our office, we have a computer that is solely used for IE 6 testing. However, this computer is not located on my desk. So, when I attempt to fix a browser bug I have to physically get out of my chair and walk over to the “IE 6 computer” to hit refresh, shake my fist and see if my hack/solution has solved the issue. Generally, I have to walk over to this computer at least 2 dozen times to make it look presentable in IE 6. I’m no fitness enthusiast, hence my excitement when I found Adobe’s Browser Lab.

This ingenious tool now allows me to test several browsers (including the dreaded IE6) from the comfort of my chair. It’s got a really cool “onion skin” feature which allows you to lay one browser rendering on top of the other and toggle transparency for faster browser bug troubleshooting. Did I mention I don’t have to get out of my chair to do browser testing anymore?

Check out the new browser tool at – https://browserlab.adobe.com/. You know you want to do it.