Web Design in Leeds

Viva La Revolution – Good bye IE6!!

The IE6 anchor has been lifted! We have decided to power down the life support effort and drop all support for Internet Explorer 6, with good reason too. Here are our reasons for not supporting this browser dinosaur; why not join the revolution yourself.

For those of you who make websites you will understand that IE6 is the cause of major headaches in the development life cycle of a website. For those of you who are internet users and have had the privilege to use a quality browser, such as Fire Fox will understand how dated, lifeless un-secure and unpleasant IE6 is compared. That leaves the internet users who are still using ie, you need to understand how the worn out bit of software your using is effecting your internet experience. A whole world of technologies awaits you – RSS feeds, Social Bookmarking, Increased performance, drag & drop multiple browser tabs. The list goes on.

Why have we stopped supporting IE6?

This is our little bit towards the finish of IE6. If our actions have inspired one more person to do so then it’s been worthwhile. Personal desires aside, we do have good reason to drop support. Not to bore you with the finer details i have listed the more important reasons.

• Over 7 years old and way past its sell by date
• Un-secure with hundreds of compatibility issues
• Last month’s Google analytics’s showed 8 visitors came from ie6 to 843 from Firefox
• All Internet Explorer browser versions together only makes up 10% of our monthly traffic
• The lack of support for modern technologies our site uses
• With the release of IE8 we cannot justify the time and effort for all three versions

In conclusion

As web designers we have a responsibility. If the sites that users are on work fine in browsers like ie6, the user has no need to upgrade. Our long hours, coding hacks and workarounds so that sites look and work in ie6 are actually the cause of ie6`s prolonged life. Need some convincing, do a little research – find out if your majority share of users is from modern browsers, research the percentage of business you will gain from ie6 support against the hours of work you will need to invest making it possible.

Check out what other people have to say on the matter, if we haven’t, then these may convince you.

• I dropped ie6
• Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade « Usability Post
• Should I / Could I drop IE6?
• Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products
• Overly Judgemental IE6 Splash Pages