IE6 No More. We Drop Support From May 1st

It's becoming a bit of a fashion trend at the moment to drop or phase out support for Internet Explorer 6. All the big boys are such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, not to mention the 1000's of other sites already taking this stance, it looks likes IE6 days are numbered (check out the Internet Explorer Voodoo Doll).

We've already Tweeted how we've dropped support on various sites recently, to much support and praise from others in the industry, but this is it, from May 1st we will be dropping it from every site we produce*. Much rejoice can be heard from the developers corner of the office.

Tweets of Support

@strawberrysoup we offer depreciated support for IE6 to our clients, so all the new stuff is supported on newer browsers....

@pixelfishltd quite simply yes!

@clarebeckingham - good decision IMO. You could always offer ie6 support as a chargeable extra.. If it's specifically requested.

@oliverbudworth We did that too. Got some interesting stats on usage I can ping your way if you're interested?

@robindthomas good work!

Although we are dropping support that's not to say our sites still won't work in IE6, they just won't look, shall we say, as pretty in them. PNGs won't render transparently, shadowing won't always look great and animated carousels and the like might end up jerky and things might not be as pixel perfect as we like. But overall everything will still display and work. We just wont be de-bugging or testing in this browser.

IE6 is a complete nightmare to support and the amount of time and effort put in by our developers to get things working in IE6 is proving costly not to mention demoralising. Remember IE6 is an outdated browser that has huge security flaws, a poor rendering engine and gradually dwindling numbers of users out there. Even Mailchimp doesn't support IE6 and nearly all our customers use this tool at some time or another.

*There's Always a But Though

So yes we are dropping support for IE6, yes this has been written into our contract terms and yes we have a great argument for all our customers, but we also work with the likes of the NHS and other public sectors. We are a business and we won't loose a client and a project if the customer has real reason to continue support. The Hampshire NHS offices for example all run Windows XP with IE6. A complete mare but to upgrade a whole office site takes time and money so of course we will work with the client and work to the best solution.

Is There Another Way?

Of course. We can also follow the example of websites such as Twitter and YouTube and add visible but not dead-end warnings to upgrade.

We must as professionals and experts in our industry start to educate those who are not familiar with these issues and explain how it all works without being patronising. It’s not their job to know this after all, it's ours.

We'd love to hear your comments on this so let us know!