Half a month ago, I wrote about our company gradually removing support for Internet Explorer 6. Well, this month we’re starting to do so. And support for IE6 is going to be accounted as an extra service.
As we try to evolve ourselves in designing websites, which often means we use many things that is not probably compatible in IE6 (such as transparent PNGs for a start), we thought that we need to do something about it. We could only hope that IE6 dies on its own soon, as the awareness is gaining. And with the fact that more people are upgrading to IE7, I think at least that’s a start, although IE7 is not our favorite browser. Compared to Firefox, Camino, Safari, or even Opera, for that matter, it doesn’t come without its own bugs.
IE6 was introduced in 2001, so it has been around for 7 years now. It was not a browser that came from natural selection. It was a browser that evolved from the market share of IE4, a savior to the internet world at its time (This was the time when Netscape goes awol and left common users with nothing but IE4 or Internet Explorer for the Mac). Over the years, it has given us lots of unnecessary hacks so that a single page would display properly there, eventhough it was semantically-coded, and validated as a valid XHTML 1.0 Strict document. Over the years, this is no longer feasible to us. When we review the things we did for IE6, we’re just helping something staying alive, but the fact is, that thing is going to die any. At the same time, we were also cocooned in the state of that limited creativity, in fear that a design might break up significantly on IE6.
Internet users, lazy corporate IT managers and staff, and ignorant Windows users (Because Mac users are saved by Safari)… Please upgrade. It’s time to move on. It’s not like you have to pay for a simple upgrade anyway. All the good browsers are free and definitely less frustrating than IE6.
More information and articles I’ve found:
SaveTheDevelopers.org
Browse Happy
Stupid IE
6 Reasons Why IE6 Must Die
37Signal: Phasing Out Support for IE6