Microsoft recently made an announcement saying that they will continue to support IE6 until August 8, 2014. That’s another 5 years. Can you imagine that? Another 5 years of supporting IE6 when HTML5 and CSS3 are just around the corner.
If you are a web developer, you probably hate IE6 as much as I do (or even more, if that much hate is ever possible). And like me, you are waiting for the day when the damn thing disappears off the face of the internet.
When I started this blog, I had planned to make it completely inaccessible to IE6 users, and instead display a message asking them to switch to some other browser. But then I realized that it’s too much effort to hack the template for the sake of spreading the message to the 1% of visitors of this blog who still use IE6.
Instead, I chose to leave all the IE6 bugs unfixed (this template looks awful on IE6) and added the banner from the IE6 No More campaign. “IE6 No More” is a campaign by a group of startups that are fed up with the ancient browser and want it to disappear. Do take a look at their website where they make a very good case against IE6.
However, there’s hope for us yet. Digg has restricted access to some of its features on IE6, Facebook is asking IE6 users to upgrade and YouTube will drop IE6 support very soon. If more big websites will also take steps in this direction, we won’t have to wait till 2014 for IE6’s death.
What browser do you use? Do you think all website should follow Facebook’s lead and ask users to upgrade?
If you are a developer, how much of you time is wasted fixing all those IE6 bugs? Have you worked on any website recently where you didn’t need to make it compatible with IE6?
PS. If you are a Firefox person and have your own website, why don’t you help spread the word about Firefox? The more IE6 users we convert, the better! ;-)