Don’t get me wrong. It’s great that Microsoft are offering all Windows XP users the opportunity to automatically upgrade on February the 12th. It’s great that web developers all over the world can start to see more and more users in the IE camp visiting their sites with a browser that won’t mess them up quite as badly as before. It’s just that, well, the king (and here, think of Henry VIII, not Richard Lionheart) isn’t dead.

The ghost of IE6 will continue to haunt the castles of the internet, throwing boiling oil over the battlements of the most carefully crafted sites and doing unspeakable things in the garderobe. The general consensus seems to be that corporate users will most likely not be upgrading: company web apps are notorious for working in one version of one browser (three guesses which). Security improvements in IE7 may be an incentive to move, but it seems unlikely that Synergize and Sons will be upgrading next Tuesday.

There may be hope. Here at NuBlue we did a little history and discovered that Henry VIII lived to a ripe old age of fifty six while his son and successor lived just fifteen years, giving a father-to-son-life-expectancy ratio of very roughly 4:1. IE6 has been making our lives hell for seven years, but with an IE8 beta ‘planned for the first half of 2008′, things are looking good. Will IE8 be in public use in one-and-a-half years? Maybe. Or maybe the light at the end of the tunnel is just IE7 SP whatever on lunch break, laughing manically whilst blowtorching the life out of a hapless stray web developer. Fingers crossed.

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