Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been the bane of web designers and developers lives for the last 7 years, thanks to it’s poor support for web standards and it’s buggy implementation of the W3C specifications. Now, with the release last year of IE7 and the upcoming release of IE8, the number of people using IE6 is finally dipping, and more and more major web presences are dropping support for it.
This is great news for us web developers – finally we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, the day when we can stop spending our time and our clients money on workarounds to correct for what is essentially a very broken piece of software.
The latest browser statistics from thecounter.com website shows IE6 market share is down to 36%, above Firefox at 17% and below IE7 at 41%. Microsoft’s ‘auto update’ has meant that a large number of IE6 users were upgraded to the newer IE7 unless they specifically opted out. And as that number dwindles, more and more sites are opting for either a policy of ‘progressive enhancement’ – where less capable browsers such as IE6 get show a subset of the sites functionality – or are just shutting out IE6 altogether, as they decide that the cost of supporting the browser exceeds the loss in revenue from not supporting it.
Apple’s new MobileMe exchange-type service was probably the first really big name to drop all support for IE6 – and following on from that 37Signals (who make the popular web-based project management app, Basecamp) also announced that they would be going down this route. As time goes on, I’m sure we will see many others doing the same.
If you are not a web designer/developer, why do you need to know this? Because if you are still using IE6, you need to upgrade to a more modern, safer, faster, less broken and more standards compliant browser as soon as possible – or you are going to start finding yourself locked out of many sites or served up a watered down version of the site in keeping with your browser’s limited functionality.
At VGroup we will not be dropping support for this old, outdated browser for the frontend of our sites just yet – it obviously still has a large (though dropping) market share. But we will be working hard to ensure as many of our clients upgrade to a better browser as possible. If you are looking for a new one, we highly recommend the excellent Firefox – it’s fast, safe and secure and will improve your online experience online no end.