Internet Explorer 6 has taken some nasty blows recently as it grips on for dear life in the browser war. To the merry cheers of web developers everywhere, Google’s YouTube announced they were soon stopping support for the 8-year-old web browser. This follows on from such other large sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg all prompting IE6 users to upgrade.
The issue here is that for many years, IE6 has been running on empty due to technological advances in web development but many web users are reluctant, ignorant or restricted in upgrading to a newer version, despite the major security issues it raises. This causes a major headache for web developers, as providing support and maintenance for websites in IE6 requires a big commitment. They’ve tried everything to persuade IE6 users to upgrade, from browser detection scripts to out right blocking of IE6 visitors.
The opinion of what to do with IE6 has caused splits in the development community. We all want to phase out IE6, it’s just a question of how it should be done. Is it moral for us to force users to upgrade their browser?
The aforementioned websites are some of the most visited sites on the web, so to have the backing from them seems to be exactly what we developers have been waiting for.
The web is at a really exciting stage right now, there’s loads of interest in HTML5 and CSS3, which will change the way we build and style websites. The problem just now is that IE6 is restricting the development and implementation of these new technologies (on a large scale, at least) because it doesn’t support HTML5 or CSS3 very well.
Once IE6 is dead and buried, the web will change forever.
I had a look at our own IE6 visitor stats and they’re showing a nice decline over the last 12 months. This month last year, www.ph-creative.com received around 8% of traffic from IE6 users, this month we received around 5%.
So is 5% of traffic worth the extra development work that the other 95% don’t need? Should we follow the large websites and stop IE6 support? Let me know what you think!
