The Last Days of IE6

We’ve all been there. We load a Web site in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and it looks terrible. Why? Because the developers for that site did not bother to support it. We are starting to see this happen more and more, since IE6 is an old browser (9 years old) and doesn’t support the latest code available to enhance the user’s Web experience. However, many organizations (and, therefore, their employees) are still working in IE6.

As you may know, HTML 5 (and CSS3 along with it) are on the horizon.  With HTML 5 will come new ways of designing and developing that IE6 cannot handle. As innovators in the industry who at the same time want our applications to work on our clients’ chosen browsers, at D2 we are paying close attention to this situation.

I must say that as a developer, I am extremely happy to see the increasing evidence  that IE6 may soon be in its death throes.  Critics of IE6 have created sites such as www.iedeathmarch.org, www.deathtoie6.com and www.bringdownie6.com. However, much stronger evidence is shown by the fact that huge social sites like Facebook, Digg and YouTube are starting to warn their users about using IE6 to browse their sites. In due time, they will no longer support the outdated browser.

Despite warnings of IE6’s imminent demise, most of our clients here at D2 Creative still use it for a couple of reasons.

• IE6 is the standard browser of Windows XP (still the OS of choice for almost 72% of users)
• Many corporate IT departments don’t see the need to upgrade

Global statistics prove otherwise. According to w3schools.com, as of August 2009 13.6% of all Internet users use IE6. That’s the lowest it has ever been, which proves that IE6 is, in fact, slowing dying.

With that said, I feel that once HTML 5, with the combination of CSS 3, begins to play a bigger role in Web design and development, we will see a decrease in support for IE6. This will in turn allow designers and developers more freedom to exercise their creativity.

If it was up to me, IE6 would have been left in the dust a couple years ago. I’m with the group that believes the sooner IE6 lays to rest, the better off we all are: designers, programmers and users.

Tags: cascading style sheets, structured markup

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Design & Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.