Goodbye IE 6 – Hello freedom!

Goodbye IE 6 – Hello freedom! 15/08/08

Today, August 15th, 37signals will be begin phasing out support for IE 6 (Microsoft Internet Explorer 6) across all their products. Apple has already taken the first step with their recently launched product, MobileMe (Yes, I know they’re not the first to not support IE 6, but probably the first to do it with a product of that magnitude).

So what’s with the fuzz?

If you’re a web developer, you probably already know what this means – for us, but also for the web experience which IE 6 has prevented for so many years.

If you’re not a web developer, and don’t understand what the whining and complaining is about, let me put it this way: IE 6 is a last generation web browser. It was released in 2001 (yes, that’s seven painful years) along with Windows XP. Since then, there has been close to no upgrades (except for maybe two dozen security patches). IE 6 was broken back then, and it is certainly broken today – It did not, and still doesn’t, support the web standards, making it often quite difficult (and definitely time consuming!!) for developers to make their web sites work perfectly in every browser.

Back then IE 5.5 (which was even worse) and IE 6 had about 90% market share, so it wasn’t such of a problem. As long as it worked in these browsers, everything was fantastic, and if the site didn’t work in e.g. Netscape Navigator – well, too bad for them.

However, IE 6 has remained as the top most used browser, simply because people didn’t know better to actually upgrade to a newer (and more securer) one, thus prohibiting webapps to reach their full potential.

It must get worse before it gets better

Luckily, IE 7 (which was released with Vista) has now reached a higher percentage than IE 6, meaning as developers, we don’t need to use countless hours to make our sites work in this old and out-dated web browser.

As of today, I will also stop supporting IE 6 for my own projects (I won’t restrict them from entering any sites, I just won’t do any effort to make it work – and ask them nicely to upgrade their browser), and I hope many will follow.

The Thögosphere