7th
Dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 - ie6
So as of March09 I, with a large number of fellow developers, and some big players (facebook, MobileMe… ) will drop support for IE6.
It sounds a bit rough right? Well let me explain…
Anyone who has built a website or web application will have known the pain that is working with Microsofts IE6. From slow rendering, to a long list of CSS display bugs, they seem to have made more things wrong than they did right with this piece of ‘software’.
There are so many better options now in the browser world, e.g Firefox, Safari, Chrome, why do people still use this piece of %#&@ IE6?!?
The biggest answer, corporations. Their nerdy systems administrators would have been very proud back in the day when they unveiled their ‘very secure’ intranets running on Windows. But, back in those days what you got with your nice new office network was Internet Explorer 6, or God forbid, earlier on, IE5.5.
Nowadays, corporations are still stuck with this almost 8 YEAR OLD browser because it is either that they have intranets that will die in a modern browser or really lazy system administrators, or both.
“It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.”
This thing is OLD, it has had its time, and now it is time to go.
So, what does this mean for the average website? In my stance, it will mean adding a notice to every site I build reminding the IE6 user that their browser is out of date, and if they wish to experience the full features of the website they should upgrade.
This notice will only be shown to someone using IE6 through the use of a conditional comment, and will provide links to current browser downloads.
There may also be less javascript functionality for IE6 users, depending on the site and it’s complexity.
Of course, if you want me to build your company a super amazing intranet interface, and it really has to be IE6 friendly, im more than happy to do so.
But if its on the web, then IE6 is dead.
