From M. Dave Auayan at IE Death March:
Internet Explorer 6 will be SEVEN years old on August 27th. It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.
It’s time to put a deadline on dropping IE6, and I say that time is now, and the deadline should be soon, say like, March 2009. That’s roughly a little more than 6 months. Feel free to join me.
And don’t think for a second that this is the only “Give IE the axe” campaign … Oh no! There are quite a few out there already. Elliot Jay Stocks says Death to IE as well.
As of now, I’m no longer including it in the standard project scope. If a client wants IE6 support, it’ll be an optional, charged-for extra.
While I agree that “fixing” (being nice here) a site to work in IE6 is a total pain the rear end (again… being nice here), according to TheCounter, IE6 is still used by 37% of internet users (for July). That’s still quite alot. So what do you do?
I think Elliots’ way of charging for IE6 support is the best way to handle this mess.
One comment that struck me on Elliot’s site is a great eye opener:
I bet you still put accessibility features into a site and I think the numbers of people who use those features are very much less than a third of the internet population.
How true it is. We slave away making sure out site is accessible to all but the number of users using Lynx or some other test browser is MUCH less than IE6 users. So why do we support them? Because they have NO CHOICE in the matter. And IE6 user CAN use another, better, browser. Not a person with certain disabilities. THAT is the difference!
I was always of the belief that you should support the latest two versions of IE. So for me, IE6 will be dropped when IE8 comes out.
So… what will you do? Will you totally drop support for IE6? Will you charge extra to support it?
