In my former life as a VP of software development for a development/consulting company, we estimated that we had to carry 25%-30% extra developers, because of IE6.  That means out of every 1o developers we had, 25%-30% of those man hours went into “dealing with” IE6.  We had a number of screens that we replicated in our applications, one screen utilized by IE6 and the other version utilized by the rest of the browsers.  Granted, the company was 100% focused on large enterprise customers as the user base, which has been slow to adopt IE7 and IE8 as their corporate browser of choice.

For those not familiar with software development, the vast majority of developers develop software using the Firefox browser.  The browser has a number of developer tools (mainly 3rd party add-ons) that substantially increase the productivity of the developer.  And by now you’ve probably deduced that not all browsers are equal. IE6 has a lot of known bugs that were just never fixed by Microsoft and it just wasn’t built to utilize many of today’s technology like off-line capability, CSS/Layouts, and a good JavaScript engine.  So, over time, developers hacked their way around IE6 (and to some degree IE7 & IE8) as it couldn’t be ignored even though it should have been put to bed.

Did you know?

IE6 was released in August 2001, here are a few major events that have taken place since then:

• 9/11 happened two weeks after the release of IE6
• Terminator 2: Judgement Day was the top grossing movie of the year
• Life House – Hanging by a Moment was the top song of 2001
• Enron scandal starts to unfold
• 13 months later Firefox 0.1 released (most importantly they are now at version 3.5.3)
• I’m 8 years older than I used to be

Introducing a smack down, corporate America style.  Google has release a beta version of Google Chrome Frame, an application that has to be installed on the computer.  But what it does, via a single meta-tag in the code, is serve up the application inside of IE6, IE7, or IE8 utilizing Google’s Chrome engine.  So in essence, Google has made Microsoft’s browsers work.

I gave it a quick test drive and it seems to work quite well, granted it wasn’t thorough testing.  The image below is an image of my Wyoming Road Trip site in native IE6 with all of the IE6 “hacks” removed.  What you can’t tell is that I’m attempting to mouse over the CSS driven menu bar.

Native IE6 Mouse Over CSS Driven Menu Bar

You may have to click on the images to see them full size to see the quality differences.  Notice the quality of the images in native IE6, the blue “shading” or whatever it is above the menu bar, and the twitter image without legs.

Now lets look at the same image also in IE6, running Google’s Chrome Frame.

IE6 Using Google Chrome Frame

Notice a few things, the first is that the IE logo on the top left corner of the screen is replaced by Chrome’s logo – very nice touch.  Also notice how much more crisp the images look, no more blue “shading” above the menu bar, the menu bar actually works when you mouse over it, and the twitter bird has legs!

I can’t even begin to express how cool this is, and the impact it COULD have.  I fear however, that it will not have the impact that one would hope for.  The only reason that IE6 has even 1% market share let alone the 20+% it does have, is once again, because many enterprises have not moved to IE7 or IE8 for various reasons.  They usually state security and training issues, I call BS on both of those excuses.  But the problem is that there are still a lot of enterprise users that don’t have access on their desktop or laptop to install software – hell if they could they would be running IE8, Chrome, or Firefox in the first place.  So while Google has successfully slapped Microsoft in the face, will the adoption of this frame really make a substantial difference, or just be another distraction for developers to worry about?  I hope the former, what do you think?

But it had to be to good to be true?  Yep, I own an iPhone and have a plan through the agless AT&T.  It doesn’t mean I can’t use Google voice on the iPhone, it just means that there isn’t a cool app that I can put on my phone to make the process easier to use.  You see, Apple and AT&T decided to reject the Google voice application and make it not available on the App Store.  Now, to use Google Voice, I have to open the web browser on the phone, navigate to Google voice, and then make a call or send a text message.  It’s not a great option, but out of spite one that I will start using.

Andy Kessler wrote a very good opinion article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Why AT&T Killed Google Voice.  I couldn’t agree more with the article, AT&T in its fight to control the pipe between you and your contacts is slowing technilogical progress.  In this article, Andy argues for four things long overneeded in the US:

• End phone exclusivity. Any device should work on any network. Data flows freely.

• Transition away from “owning” airwaves. As we’ve seen with license-free bandwidth via Wi-Fi networking, we can share the airwaves without interfering with each other. Let new carriers emerge based on quality of service rather than spectrum owned. Cellphone coverage from huge cell towers will naturally migrate seamlessly into offices and even homes via Wi-Fi networking. No more dropped calls in the bathroom.

• End municipal exclusivity deals for cable companies. TV channels are like voice pipes, part of an era that is about to pass. A little competition for cable will help the transition to paying for shows instead of overpaying for little-watched networks. Competition brings de facto network neutrality and open access (if you don’t like one service blocking apps, use another), thus one less set of artificial rules to be gamed.

• Encourage faster and faster data connections to our homes and phones. It should more than double every two years. To homes, five megabits today should be 10 megabits in 2011, 25 megabits in 2013 and 100 megabits in 2017. These data-connection speeds are technically doable today, with obsolete voice and video policy holding it back.

What should Google’s next course of action be?  I would suggest a deal that allows them to sell Android with data only plans.  That might slice into a piece of Apple’s pie.