Death to IE6

I’m in the midst of exploring redesigns to all my personal sites for a number of reasons, chiefly that it’s been quite a while since the last one and that the current design has one or two “show stopper” problems that I simply didn’t consider when creating the design.

What I’m hoping to do is to keep the aspects of the design that I think work, discard the ones that don’t, simplify everything a great deal and… drop support for Internet Explorer 6.

It isn’t an exaggeration to state that I loathe IE6. It is a 7-year-old browser and it shows. Its support of current web technologies and capabilities is, to be kind, lacking, and I find that in my freelance work the one browser I am constantly adjusting for and making exceptions for is that one. IE7 isn’t altogether perfect, and I look forward to IE8 now in public beta, but IE6 is a disaster of enormous proportions and deserves to die.

37Signals began to drop support for IE6 in its many tools starting this month. Salesforce is going to continue to support IE6, but any new interface tools and capabilities won’t work. Looking around the web, I note that usage of IE6 is still at a minimum of 25% and goes all the way up to 50%, the larger numbers mainly at those sites used primarily by large corporations that rely on a centralized tech department to move its users up to IE7, and it just hasn’t happened in the two years since it became available.

I know my site has a very tiny audience and I also know that most of you are using Firefox and Safari rather than any flavor of Internet Explorer, so there’s no need to poke you in the ribs to please remind you that it’s past time to update your browser. But for the rest of you, if you’re still using IE6, I can guaran-damn-tee you that when the redesign hits, you’re going to be slightly unhappy campers.

If you’re using IE6, please update/upgrade/change to something else ASAP. If you’re on windows, I recommend Firefox. Frankly, if you’re on a Mac, I also recommend Firefox. Although Safari does a lot of things right, the whole “Flash makes my browser freeze up,” no matter who is to blame, is a headache that can be easily avoided.