IE6 Doesn’t Need Leechblock

My company still has Internet Explorer 6 as the standard browser on all their machines. IE6 is of course appalling. Microsoft itself is telling people that enough is enough, and that IE9 is out now, and please upgrade. There are a couple of campaigns to kill IE6 once and for all, because it is old tech that is holding the web back:

I installed Mozilla Firefox at work for my day-to-day browsing, although all my work links, like the expenses system, timesheets and so on are in IE6, just for consistency. The company intranet is run on MS SharePoint, which actually seems to run better on IE than on Firefox – probably because of some proprietary jiggery-pokery that cripples it on a proper browser. SharePoint is truly dreadful, as I tell people whenever I can.

I do get distracted by web stuff at work sometimes, which has led me to installing Leechblock, an excellent plugin for Firefox which allows you to add websites to a blacklist, and then stops you from visiting them. You can bypass the block, but only by entering a (configurable) 64-character string into a dialogue box, which is just enough to dissuade me. You can also easily add a site you are visiting to the blacklist, and set various times when the list is in operation. For example, I let myself visit YouTube at lunchtime.

I think it’s a testament to how bad IE6 is that I don’t need Leechblock when viewing sites when using that browser, because it makes all the fun stuff nigh-on unusable anyway.