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IE6 end of life

 

April 17 2011

Now that Microsoft has a site telling people to no longer use Internet Explorer 6, it is time to say enough is enough.

Back when I designed the CSS for this site, some five years ago, I went to a lot of contortions to make the website IE6 compatible. Indeed, whenever I did the site design for a web page, about 20-50% of the work involved making the site work in IE6.

A year ago, when I was doing a web design gig, a posted three blog entries about the issues getting web pages to work in IE6.

Enough is enough. IE6 usage in the United State, Europe, and Latin America is below 5%. Google no longer tries to make their sites IE6-compatible. Going to YouTube in IE6 causes one to see a notice that their browser is outdated. It would appear C|Net is doing the same.

While older web page designs will remain IE6 compatible, I will not make any revisions backwards-compatible. I am in the process of starting to have warnings (courtesy Microsoft) to upgrade from IE6 on my webpages.

IE6 was the state of the art of standards compliance when it came out. But that was ten years ago. We are in the 2010s and it's time to move on.

P.S. For people with older computers which can not run newer versions of Internet Explorer, Opera is a lightweight browser with support for modern web standards.

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