James Thomas outlines a plan for killing off support of IE6.
My friend Andrew and I were talking about this issue just last night, so I was amused to find this article sitting in my feeds this morning.
IE6 has become the bane of my existence - and I have been wondering if IE6 support is something that we should be aiming for in the medium term - after all, IE7 is a free upgrade, Firefox is a wonderful free alternative, and, well, IE6 sucks donkey’s balls.
The only logical reason I can think of for not having IE7 or Firefox (Or Safari on OSX, which is what I use) is because you are stuck with IE6 on a work computer and your IT Department hasn’t, um, deployed that FREE upgrade yet… and part of me thinks that it is the role of developers to push for change. As long as we keep supporting outdated, time consuming software (even when our audiences are predominantly broadband-enabled, modern browser using folks like mine!), people will see no incentive at all to change. It’s a cycle that we need to break, in many respects.
So I am certainly in 2 minds, and often write 2 different stylesheets - one with pretty transparent PNGs and lovely styling, the other with GIFs. Bleh.
Anyway, this is an interesting article and I think I may just start doing this — assuming that clients don’t protest of course 
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EDIT: I have actually been giving this some more thought. I think that we should start an initiative, a promotion, a campaign, whatever, to have an International “Upgrade Your Browser” Day. It can be a yearly event, much like the successful Blog Action Day that recently occured, but with developers and other web professionals campaigning for people to upgrade their browsers.
Thoughts? Anyone in?
EDIT 2: I have now gone ahead and registered “browserupdateday.com” (BUD), which will have 2 main ideas: helping people to upgrade their browsers themselves and encouraging people to upgrade the browsers of their less-tech-savvy friends, family and… errr… being a “bud” to both them and the industry.
Thoughts??
December 21st, 2007 at 4:49 pm
I love it. This is how an idea gains traction.
When you have the domain content up, let me know… I’ll run a follow-up article. It’s been getting a lot of attention and support from designers.
December 21st, 2007 at 4:49 pm
By the way, your comment form is very oddly formatted in Opera, and your About link gives me a 404.
December 23rd, 2007 at 10:58 am
LOL Thanks James — I didnt realise that the about.php link was doing that… thanks for letting me know.
And Opera… Will have a look at that. I really need to work on browserupdateday.org over the next week!