We will no longer support Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in websites we build from January 1st 2010 onwards.
As you may already know, IE6 is a very outdated web browser, originally released in 2001. It does not support the latest web standards and technologies compared to modern browsers which offer a rich support for HTML5, CSS2 or CSS3. Not to mention all the IE6 quirks and bugs which were sadly never fixed and that require a great deal of extra time web developers have to spend to make websites IE6 compatible.
Microsoft realized that the IE6 was not the greatest piece of software they have ever written and after about 5 years of development they released Internet Explorer 7. Furthermore in March 2009 they even released todays latest version, Internet Explorer 8. Both successors offer a lot of improvements compared to the old IE6 and most importantly a better support of today’s web standards.
We decided to discontinue IE6 browser support by the end of this year. This means websites build by us in 2009 will still be IE6 compatible, but starting in January 2010 we will not test IE6 compatibility anymore.
By doing so we follow a current trend of dropping IE6 support, as announced on a lot of popular websites like Youtube, Apple MobileMe, Basecamp or Digg.
Why are we dropping the IE6 support? IE6 is clearly a past-generation browser and cannot deliver a rich user experience that modern browsers can. Also this step allows us to focus on modern web technologies to optimize and enhance our templates without all the IE6 drawbacks.
With the HTML5 standard looming around the corner we´re sure that this will give our future websites an additional boost and we are very excited about things to come.
So on January 1st 2010 we finally say “Goodbye IE6″.
Hello and thank you for visiting our website.