Q&A: Why I started the anti-IE6 petition

No, they don't. They just assume it will work on their systems. So we as developers have knowledge that most departments and most offices councils and local authorities, as they are in Scotland and most Government funded bodies will all be running IE6, as a matter of course, because it's too expensive to upgrade.

I know from experience working with that that we need to ensure it works on IE6, but what we're trying to do is say: "let's no longer have IE6 as a default browser for the clients that we're building for." And, to make it an extra cost.

That's not to say that we wouldn't do it [build for IE6] and we're not saying that we as a company won't support IE6 in the future for anything that we've done - that's what we've been contracted to do. But for any new work, it would be an extra cost.

And the idea behind that is to try to drive them to acknowledge the cost of developing for such an old browser?

Yeah, just acknowledge it's an extra cost for developers. We can build really good systems for them, and sites that do good things, make it easier for users, if they're not having to use IE6.

The feedback for the e-petition has been quite good. More than 5,000 people have already signed last time we checked. How do you feel about all of that? Is it what you expected?

I was really taken aback, actually. I had a figure in my mind that if it had gotten to 1,000 by Friday that would be pretty amazing.

Having 500 signatures means it's allegedly then put in front of Gordon Brown, and [will] be considered by the Prime Minister's Office as to whether that's something that should go forward, to be considered for Government policy.

Whether it does anything or not like that is totally up to them. It's a policy decision then. And if the policy decisions then go into actual action is something else, as we know.

So 5,000 is just amazing. I think that's mostly down to the BBC picking it up. They reported that it had just 44 at that time, but then it had only been up online since four o'clock the day before, so they weren't really giving it a chance.

I think maybe people said "oh, if it's just 44!" and they didn't really have the background for how long it'd been online, they were likely to sign up. Within a day it'd gone to over 3,000.

If you had your say with the Government, which browser would you have them using? Does it matter if it's IE8 or Firefox or something else, as long as it's something modern?

It doesn't matter. As long as it will handle the standards compliant HTML and CSS that we work with all the time. This is going to be an even bigger issue when HTML5 comes in.

The longer they wait the harder it's going to be. Most Government departments - almost everyone - will be using Microsoft Windows, so it's an upgrade from Windows 2000 that was the issue.

Windows Vista was seen as a little bit buggy to run and not as stable as they would have liked it to be, but Windows 7 seems to be something that's more stable and then they could go straight to IE8.

XP was more of a personal computing choice, while 2000 was an enterprise system, so they upgraded from NT to 2000, and then from 2000 hopefully to Windows 7.