The reports of its death are…pretty fabulous, actually
It looks like 2010 will be the year Internet Explorer 6 finally dies. Googling for "ie6" returns a Microsoft-sponsored ad for IE9 (now in public beta), followed by a slew of sites campaigning to phase out the antiquated browser. Some of the biggest players on the web—Google, YouTube, Facebook—officially dropped support for IE6 this year, to much fanfare. Most (if not all) of my clients and colleagues have followed suit.
This is remarkable for a browser that still claims a double-digit percentage of the market. Businesses don't willingly shut out ten percent of their potential customer base, unless that ten percent is an enormous pain in the ass.
It's also exactly what needed to happen. The main reason IE6 is still alive is that corporate IT departments have been reluctant to upgrade from aging Microsoft enterprise software that doesn't work in modern browsers. By unilaterally dropping support, web developers are forcing their hand.
Sorry, guys—I know that major version upgrades of mission-critical enterprise systems aren't fun (or cheap). But you're holding back the web, and you're making an awful lot of extra work and frustration for web developers and their clients. IE6 is almost a decade old, and it's been superseded by two major versions, with a third—IE9—in public beta. It's time to move on.
Once IE9 is in general release, I suspect very few developers will continue supporting IE6.
What about IE7? It's far superior to IE6, but still dodgy. Fortunately, the situation that has kept IE6 around for so long—a widely installed base of expensive-to-replace software that only works in one browser—doesn't apply to IE7. With IE6 in the grave, IE7 can fade away much more gracefully.
We'll probably have to support it for a while yet—there will always be those users who don't know what a browser is, much less how to upgrade one or why they should do so. But IE7 won't be around a decade from now.
Who knows? A few years from now, maybe I'll even remember IE6—in all its neurotic naïveté—with fond nostalgia, as I now remember Netscape 4. Maybe.
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