Categories
Mozilla Web Development

Killing IE 6

Apple’s MobileMe will not support IE 6. Per an email to subscribers:

To use the new web applications, make sure you have one of these browsers: Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox 2 or later.

37signals is now doing the same, and will be dropping IE 6 support.

For most things that I’m in developing, IE 6 still has to much market share to ignore. That said, I can’t wait until the day we can kill IE 6. It’s from a previous generation of web browsers. It’s time for it to go.

Considering IE 7 is a free upgrade, or you could download the awesome Firefox 3, or Safari 3 it’s about time. I suspect we’ll see more and more sites start to do this, and likely in 2009 see some larger mainstream products no longer support IE 6.

It’s great to see the process starting. I can’t even begin to estimate the hours I’ve wasted getting IE 6 to work with something trivial on all other browsers.

The advantage of killing some old browser support is that it’s easier to take advantage of some of the features in more modern browsers that have much more robust features and better CSS support. Not to mention PNG transparency that doesn’t suck.

Modern web browsers like Firefox invest a lot into features to allow for a better web experience. Killing support for old browsers means they can be used. It’s the start of a better web.