A good new year’s resolution would be to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6. Google is picking up where youTube left off and officially announced that they will drop IE6 support starting with their Apps and Sites. Personally, I stopped supporting IE6 in my work a year ago, but, in my heart, I stopped supporting IE6 a long long time ago.
Friday’s news brings me to wonder:
- How does the continuing support of antiquated browsers affect the internet’s evolution?
- Should web developers stopped supporting IE6 years ago in order to push the internet going public to upgrade their browsers?
- Why didn’t users upgrade anyway?
- Should support have stopped a certain amount of time after IE7 came out?
- How long should we support antiquated browsers when HTML5 and CSS3 finally come off the drawing board and further affect our designs?
IE6 has been such a headache for developers with its weird handling of padding and margins and floats and .png transparency and blatant disregard for web standards that several websites focused on persuading web developers to finally drop support have cropped up:
Internet Explorer 6 came out 9 years ago. The upgrade is free! So much has happened to the internet in the past decade, but with the extended support of IE6, have developers been making a headache for themselves by continuing to support IE6? Could we have made this torture stop at any time by banding together against IE6? HTML5 and CSS3 are important upgrades to the internet; How will the transition be handled?
“IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web.” – Jeff Zeldman, standards guru
To be fair, I did find one site that is petitioning to save IE6.
Additional interesting articles from about the web:
Filed under Browser Issues
