I can guarantee I am not the only web designer happy about this one. There has been news on the internet floating around about the death of Internet Explorer 6 within the past month. Google is showing support by joining the anti-Internet Explorer 6 campaign that basically states Google will not be supporting the nine year old browser anymore. Really when you think about, designing your CSS and HTML (or XHTML) coding for clients who insist on using IE6 really holds back your creativity. Not to mention this could end up costing your company more because weeding out all those bugs can be timely.
Google Reader, an RSS service that posts feed updates on its site using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom standards is not going to support Internet Explorer 6 anymore.
“Reader is a cutting edge Web application, and this will allow us to spend our time improving Reader instead of fixing issues with antiquated browsers,” said Mihai Parparita, an engineer with the Reader team, in a post to group’s blog last Monday.
There is a troubleshooting post on Google Reader’s help page stating the phase out of the old browser.
Another web analytic company, StatCounter , recently released data showing that Internet Explorers market share is dwindling. The amount of users currently using Internet Explorer 6 has fallen 4.7% which is down 11.5% from a year ago. These usage trends were based on over fifteen billion page views in the month of May 2010. Currently IE7 is holding the largest market share, with FireFox 3.6 and IE7 following behind.
One of the main reasons that IE6 is still in use today is that many corporate users are still using Windows XP which ships with Internet Explorer 6. A lot of these company’s were hesitant to update to Windows Vista, and Windows 7 is so new that IT is waiting for analysts reports to come out on the performance of Microsoft’s new OS.
There are plenty of other websites that have dropped IE6, for instance YouTube dropped support earlier this year. There is even a website which lists sites that have dropped IE6 support ,you can even add your site to show you are no longer supporting this dreadful internet browser! We have even written a few posts about Internet Explorer 6 bugs, css and xhtml coding.
