Internet Explorer 6 was launched on August 27, 2001.
Over nine years later and despite two major updates it lives on. Internet Explorer Six was never a very well built bit of software. It’s security is poor at best (some say the least secure software on the planet), it lacks support for modern web standards and increases development time. Nothing works on IE6. Well, it does – but only after hours of re-writing perfectly good, standards compliant code in just the right way to work on this lumbering dinosaur of a system.
Well, this will go on no more.
Google are officially dropping support for IE6 from the 1st March.
YouTube are officially dropping support for IE6 from 13th March.
And we are dropping support for IE6 now.
What this means
- Websites will work fine in IE6, but some advanced functionality will not.
- Some elements will not display correctly in IE6.
- Users visiting a website in IE6 will be notified that they are using an out of date browser, that some site functionality will be unavailable. They will be advised to upgrade.
Why everyone is dropping support for IE6
Websites have become more and more functional. There are so many visitor friendly things a site can do – auto-suggest words for your search term, show information relevant to your location, provide one-click shopping baskets, show video, audio, and allow users to do countless things. As technology becomes more advanced, making it work on obsolete browsers becomes increasingly difficult and time consuming. Spending every increasing parts of a budget getting a site to work on a dated system does not make good business sense – it increases development time with little benefit to our clients or the end user.
In any case, support for IE 5.5 ended many years ago – the only reason IE6 has lasted so long is that it’s the default browser for Windows XP – and we’re now two iterations further down the road (Vista and now Windows 7), it’s time to follow suit.
What if I still want support for IE6?
If you still want it, you can have it. All we are doing is removing support as a standard procedure. There are perfectly legitimate reasons why you would want a site to work in IE6, and these include:
- Sites where the demographic still largely uses IE6
- Intranet sites
- Sites targeting third world countries
If you feel you need it, make sure your developers continue to support it. As the major players phase out support, other companies will follow suit. If you need it, make sure you make it clear.
