At first glance at this update from 37Signals, I shrugged and said my usual cynical, "Who cares?" until I realized the drastic progression ensuing the process of companies slowly ditching support for the outdated and bug-ridden Internet Exploerer 6. 37Signals is phasing out Internet Explorer 6 support on every single product they distribute, and is starting a trend that is much appreciated by almost every web developer. If this catches onto more mainstream markets, in which major online players eventually decide to cut Internet Explorer 6 off, more websites will focus on creating semantic and standards-compliant code rather than violating standards and ruining clean code in order to properly display in an outdated browser. The catch, 26.5% of web surfers are using Internet Explorer 6. Although that number may be a minority, it is still a large audience.
Microsoft has updated Internet Explorer to version 7. Many people view this browser with mixed emotions; it heavily improves upon its prior releases, but it still is a far way from true standards compliance.
Firefox, however, is slowly changing the complications commonly associated with technologies surrounding web site presentation. With its 41% market share, Firefox has heavily optimized both resource usage and rendering. The improvements made by Apple and Opera are also putting pressure on the not-so-dominant Internet Explorer for change.
The pressure put on Microsoft by the browser developments made by Opera, Apple, and Mozilla are still not enough to reduce the 26.5% if people still make the web work well on Internet Explorer. What most developers who consider the needs of Internet Explorer users are missing is the fact they they are encouraging the use of an outdated browser that cannot properly handle modern tasks. Programmers are supplementing proper coding with hacks, and hindering the future implementations of CSS3, JavaScript 1.6+, and XHTML 2.0.
Once users see a majority of the web as a disfunctional mess, only to realize it was their own fault for ignoring the pestering Windows Update notifications, they will adopt browsers that give them a better experience whilst also allowing developers to use the web-based technologies they want to implement.
Greg Wolejko, on July 11, 2008 at 12:55pm, said:
I can't completely agree with you on that.
In my opinion supporting specific browser depends greatly on the specific site and its user profiles.
IE6 might have 25% market share but one project I was (and still am) working on has 50%+ visits from users using IE6. Does that mean we should drop the IE6 support? I don't think so.
On the other hand I don't believe that pages should render the same way in every browser thus you need to only assure graceful degradation in IE6 and not implement all the cool stuff that modern browsers support.
Just my two cents,
cheers