Yesterday was one of those days, where I had to put up with the odds of the IE6 again. It wrecked my head, even having found different handy solutions for e.g. using PNG, it is still a major act to get it right. It used to be a challenge, but it has become a nuisance, so with effect of tomorrow, the 1st of March 2009, we will no longer be supporting the IE6 in web design.
The Internet Explorer 6 was developed in 2001, but since, the Internet has completely move beyond the IE6. The Internet Explorer 6 is in fact probably the worst browser ever. Just to list the two most important of its oddities:
- Barely supports the current standards in XHTML and CSS
- No native support for PNG Graphics
If we, the web developers and designer do not stop the support of IE6, nobody will. A lot of companies still use this old piece of software junk, because we still provide nice looking sites for it. Mostly at our or our clients costs. Why should they bother with the expensive roll-out of some proper Browser?
So what are the consequences?
Sites we design by standard will not be tweeked anymore to look exactly the same in IE6 and if they break completely, we will provide a text-only version by unsing a special CSS-Stylesheet. I addition, of course, we will offer the possibility of downloading a state-of-the-art browser of your choice.
It’s the clients choice
Some clients will insist to still have support for the IE6 and if our strong recommendations do not suffice, we will inplement IE6 support at additional costs.
I stopped support for IE6 since one year. With giving me headache every single time it was no longer bearable to support this crappy bug release. Good thing to call everybody to the line to stop supporting IE6 anymore.
Roger
I hear your pain and it’s a brave decision but one I might make also.