28 August 2008
Browser support - the death of IE6?
Posted by Dan under: web development .
The IE Death March site has been doing the rounds of the Twitterverse over the last few days attempting what many have tried before. It’s a tough one; IE6 when it came out was a decent browser but as the site reminds us it’s 7 years old - an age in web years! It’s also the bane of most developers lives with hacks or conditional styles needed to make it behave like most other browsers.
It’s market share might finally be waning in favour of it’s bigger brother, IE7 but can we really stop developing for it? I would love to but the reality is that it’s still used by a huge number of people; many of which are within huge companies or colleges/universities and have to wait for their network guys to upgrade the whole system.
Maybe it’s partly because of this that it seems that Microsoft has a real image problem amongst web developers? Sitepoint asks ‘Would you switch to IE8?‘ and from the looks of the comments so far, the answer from many people is no. Although IE8 appears to have made some strides to be more standards compliant and I’m sure it’s a great browser, Microsoft seem to be playing catch-up in a market they pretty much owned, allowing Firefox and Opera amongst others to dig away at their market share. That’s great for a more competitive marketplace but maybe they’ve not stepped up their game to convince developers Internet Explorer is a great browser.
So what do you think? Drop IE6 support now? Will IE8 be much cop?
Update
Check out Elliot Jay Stocks & Alex Older’s views on this.
2 Comments so far...
Phil Thompson Says:
29 August 2008 at 4:28 pm.
You simply can’t drop IE6 support for most sites, yet - there’s still too many people still using it. I think we’ve reached a point where sites have to still work in IE6 but perhaps you shouldn’t spend too much time perfecting the design - as long as it works and isn’t completely broken you’re ok.
It’s good to see IE8 having better support but IE7 isn’t too bad just lacking still. For me, rounded corners (border-radius) and opacity would be great to have in IE8.
Dan Says:
29 August 2008 at 4:38 pm.
I’m with you on that. It seems like a lot of people are starting to offer IE6 compatibility as additional service instead of cater for that automatically, which is fairly indicative of where developers would like to see IE6 support go.
I also caught this recently, which won’t help developer’s outlook on the future of IE: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/29/hakon_lie_ie8_interoperability/
