Microsoft to support IE6 until 2014!!
In: Web design
Microsoft has announced that it intends on supporting it’s ageing IE6 browser till 2014, 4 years later than it’s original deadline!
I’m absolutely over the moon about this and I intend to organise a celebration, and invite all my web professional peers, where we can dance through the streets and rejoice! ;-).
Obviously…I won’t be doing this. What I will be doing is spending hours of my time adjusting and tweaking my clean, semantic XHMTL code, inserting hacks and filters to accommodate this prehistoric browser.
Over time I have conditioned myself in constructing my sites in a way that I tend not to need any hacks and filters for my sites to work in IE6. I’ve learnt what not to do and which is the best way to achieve, visually, what I want. However as web technology continues to progress and new functionality becomes available such as jQuery and CSS3 techniques, this is where my time is lost trying to crowbar these features in to an IE6 environment.
I understand that IE6 is core to some large businesses and corporations and the upgrade to a more recent browser would be a large operation. But it seems Microsoft aren’t doing enough to encourage users to upgrade to at least IE7 and possibly IE8. The recent announcement reinforces my feelings.
I’ve being using FireFox for my primary browser since V1, and it seems, judging by the browsers increasing market share currently at 22%, many more people are doing the same.
Let’s all contribute to retiring this browser and utilise our power of choice. Try out these alternative browsers…you’ll never go back.