Is Time Up For IE6?

With the recent launch of Internet Explorer 8 the blogs are buzzing with the hope that IE6 will become redundant and we can finally stop developing sites based around IE6’s capabilitys. Gone are the days of hacks, workarounds and the hours of wasted development when it works fine on all of the other A-Grade browser in the known universe!

Alas. This is not the case.

Internet Explorer 6 is still, unfortunately, widely used and for the websites that I manage it accounts for approximately 60% of their traffic.
I feel the main reason for this comes down to Windows XP. IE6 is (or certainly was, I don’t know if Microsoft have changed this) the default browser when you install XP, and being one of many people who were so disgruntled with Vista that a downgrade was an improvement that I wouldn’t be suprised IE6 has had a temporary resurgence.

However, with the recent launch of Internet Explorer 8 and the upcoming launch of Windows 7 (of which the reviews have been positive) hopefully soon we will be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

So, I can safely and sadly say that it is not yet time to cut IE6 loose. It is impossible to neglect such a huge number of users for any reason, let alone for reasons of design opportunity and development time. For the time being myself and the web community will continue to tally up those frustrating hours spent on cross-browser compatibility, which is a process that hopefully soon will be relatively painless.

Note. I am sure it will shock many fellow designers that I am not a mac user. Hopefully, when they release a Macbook that can support 2 external displays I will join you :o)/