IE6: The End of an Era

With the release of Internet Explorer 8, we've decided it's time to drop support for version 6.

The story of Internet Explorer 6 is a long one. It had a market share as high as 71% of all browsers used at one point, but that number has been consistently declining since September of 2005. As other browsers (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer 7, Opera, Chrome, and more) have gained popularity, web developers have been forced to develop websites and web applications for multiple platforms; for a time taking the focus away from advancing the technology in favor of coming up with ways to work around Internet Explorer 6's deficiencies in order to bring it up to speed with its competitors.

The driving force behind Internet Explorer 6's initial popularity is that for the duration of its lifespan it was bundled with Windows as the default browser, and for a time there really wasn't a better alternative, at least not a significantly better one. I can only attribute the lingering user base 2 full versions later to users who either don't know how to update Windows or don't want to. Internet Explorer also still lacks the in-browser update capabality that other browsers support. In firefox, I can just choose "Update Firefox" in the menu (or, it will notify me when a major update is available), whereas in Internet Explorer I have to rely on Windows Update or go to the website to find out if a newer version than the one I have is available.

So, everyone who does what I do has been developing for both Firefox/Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 6 for a few years now. The general attitude has been to make sure everything works for IE6 users as well as it does for IE7/Firefox users, and when that's not possible to get as close as possible, or at the very least fail silently. With the release of IE8, it's become unrealistic to try and support IE6, IE7, IE8 and Firefox. We've been clammoring to drop IE6 support for a while now, and finally got our wish, official support for Internet Explorer 6 has been stopped.

What does this mean for our IE6 users? Well, anything we've done up to this point will continue working with IE6, and we'll do our best in the future to make everything as universal as possible. But, there may be cases where something works on every browser except IE6, and we can't fix those things anymore. So, if you're still using Internet Explorer 6, Upgrade!

Posted by Dan Montgomery on June 01, 2009 at 11:19 am EST

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