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Giving up on MSIE6

Software

Soon I will be making a bold decision: I'm going to stop trying to make my new web sites work in Internet Explorer 6.

First of all, Internet Explorer 7 is a huge improvement. No serious hacks but only a few tweaks and workarounds were necessary to get my designs working in it. Believe it or not, a single static CSS file now actually gives me exactly what I want under all of MSIE7, Firefox , Opera and Safari/Konqueror. MSIE6 has really become the ugly duckling on the web and now that even Microsoft has a somewhat reasonable browser, even Redmond fanboys can escape its CSS horrors.

Also, Microsoft is doing everything it can to get a larger install base for MSIE7. MSIE6 has dropped from nearly 100% (amongst IE users) to 65% in the first few months. This puts the overall market share of MSIE6 under 50% - and falling with every use of Windows Update or Vista install. Consider how MSIE5.5 is already below 1% in market share and it's not a bad assumption something similar will happen to MSIE6 in a year time. And why spend time on getting things to work with obsolete software? This is 2007, where updating software is infinitely easier than it was in 1996 when 14k4 modems roamed the world.

So this is where I draw the line. Bye MSIE6.

© Copyright 1995-2009 Robert John Kaper. All rights reserved.

Tom has more friends but mine are prettier! (#1/1)