I know from talking to web designers and developers that Internet Explorer 6 gives them lots of headaches. While it may not be the only cause of heartache it’s a clear and tangible one.
Of course there have been plenty of “upgrade to firefox” type campaigns in the past, but most seemed to ignore a simple fact. Many corporate users can’t simply upgrade browsers without their IT department’s “ok”.
Be that as it may if you can get more people away from Internet Explorer 6, then your web designers and developers might thank you.
Have a look at the campaign over on Save The Developers (via)
If everyone used standards compliant browsers a lot of these web “developers” would be out of work 🙂
Well, I’m willing to take the risk. IE6 adds far too much time to every project and forces you to go around the block to get things to work.
My CSS work has actually developed to a point now where I instinctively make a lot of the fixes for IE6 as I’m going, so much so that I might find it hard to remember that there are other options!
There are loads of nice things you can do with CSS2 that I just don’t even bother playing with because they aren’t going to work in IE6 (and a lot of them don’t work in IE7), that it’s just too much work to get them working in FF the easy way, and then work out something else for IE6.
I am becoming much more likely to not worry about the website looking slightly different in IE6. A lot of the time just as a result of IE6’s inability to do transparent png’s without reams of javascript and alpha loaders etc..
I see 37signals announced yesterday that they are withdrawing support for IE6 – all future functionality will not be guaranteed to work.
keith
IE6 is the bane of my life – well something had to replace 5.5 🙂
@Keith 37signals have a limited userbase, so they have the option of doing that. The rest of us can’t realistically
@Peter – M$ love you 🙂
@ Michele – 37signals claim over a million people and businesses use their applications. If true then I admire your perspective on their scale 🙂
See also http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/749-ask-37signals-numbers
keith
Keith
Have a look at the market niche they are serving. They aren’t going to be catering to all users regardless of the numbers
Michele
@ Michele – you are absolutely right – limited in the sense of the types of user :-). Apologies, I misunderstood your post.
keith