Goodbye IE6?
YouTube, the Google-owned video site, started displaying a notification on their site to all IE 6 users recently stating that they would soon be dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE 6) and encouraging their users to upgrade to a modern browser. IE 6, now an eight year old browser, has been entirely eclipsed by newer, more modern browsers including Microsoft’s own IE 7 and IE 8. IE 6 has been the bane of web developers for many years as new standards and technologies have emerged requiring hacks, loopholes, and workarounds to get IE 6 to play nicely in today’s web world.
YouTube is by no means the first site to actively pursue dropping support for IE 6. However, they are the largest and most well known site to be doing so. Other sites that are currently making the transition away from IE 6 include Facebook, Twitter (the micro-blogging service), and Digg. Last year, smaller web services like Apple Inc’s. MobileMe, and 37signal’s BaseCamp dropped support as well.
So, why are all these companies deciding to ditch support for IE 6 even while IE 6 currently commands upwards of 15% market share? That’s simple. As the web has become a more dominant platform, and as standards have advanced, IE 6 has stagnated the development of what a web site can do. It’s not uncommon, or even unreasonable for developers (including yours truly), to spend upwards of 30%-40% of their time making new features work in IE 6. That’s a painful price to pay, especially for only 5-15% of users.
One may ask, why do people keep using IE 6? Well, the Digg team asked that question too and discovered that, of their members using IE 6 (10% of their visitors), over 75% were either stuck using it at work, or lacked administrator access on their computers to upgrade to a newer browser. Still Digg is making the plans to move forward without IE 6 support for many of it’s key features, a move that should save them money while granting their developers more time for building better features, instead of building bigger hacks.
It will be a great day when IE 6 truly is an obsolete browser. Site owners will delight in the lower cost of development and developers will revel in the joy of coding for the web and having it Just Work™!
Shoe
July 21st, 2009
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