Microsoft will not follow in the footsteps of Mozilla, which traditionally kills off support for a certain Firefox browser within six months after the release of the succeeding iteration of the open-source browser. Instead, the Redmond company has indicated a strong commitment to keep Internet Explorer 6 alive despite the release of Internet Explorer 7 in late 2006 and of Internet Explorer 8 in March 2009. The Redmond company acknowledged that IE6 was by any standards an inferior browser compared to its successors, but revealed that it would not kill support just to force current users to upgrade to IE7 or IE8.

“For technology enthusiasts, this topic seems simple. Enthusiasts install new (often unfinished or “beta”) software all the time. As a browser supplier, we want people to switch to the latest version of IE for security, performance, interoperability, and more. So, if all of the “individual enthusiasts” want Windows XP machines upgraded from IE6, and the supplier of IE6 wants them upgraded, what’s the issue?” asked Dean Hachamovitch, IE GM. “The choice to upgrade software on a PC belongs to the person responsible for the PC.”

Hachamovitch made it clear that organizations had different strategies to manage their IT environments versus end users. In this context, the choice to run a certain browser belongs to the IT department and not to the computer users. And of course that there are a variety of factors to be taken into consideration, from Total Cost of Ownership to potential security issues.

“For these folks, the cost of the software isn’t just the purchase price, but the cost of deploying, maintaining, and making sure it works with their IT infrastructure. They balance their personal enthusiasm for upgrading PCs with their accountability to many other priorities their organizations have. As much as they (or site developers, or Microsoft or anyone else) want them to move to IE8 now, they see the PC software image as one part of a larger IT picture with its own cadence,” Hachamovitch added.

In the first half of July 2009, Eric Lawrence, IE PM, revealed that it was critical for Microsoft to support IE6 as much as it could. Lawrence argued that organizations currently using IE6 were doing so because they were not prepared to move to IE7 or IE8, and that discontinued support would only leave them using a browser with no additional security or reliability patches but fail to convince them to upgrade from a browser that is eight years old.

“Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have,” Hachamovitch said.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).