Die IE6!
IE6 (also affectionately called Internet Exploder by some) has been a huge burden on the web as a whole for several years now. While the average web consumer might not notice it, the ubiquity of IE6 has forced web developers and designers to jump through many arbitrary hoops in the past to support the non-compliant browser.
This has meant that precious development and design resources over the last several years have been slaving away at making IE6 look good, instead of focusing on making web sites/apps/designs work better. This also has meant that one major strength of the web (portability) was hampered by the need to address a specific platform.
The good news is, several companies are beginning to drop support for IE6, in favor of more recent browsers, most recently Google. This is not surprising for Google as they have been pushing alternative browsers like Firefox and, more recently Chrome for a while now.
For web developers, this comes as great news - there is now a major web player moving the masses away from IE6, which hopefully accelerates the adoption of newer generation browsers.
For Ronin, we’ve never really supported IE6 to begin with and we’ve seen no reason to really bother with bending over backwards to begin supporting IE6 now that it’s hopefully on its way to the grave. Analysis of our traffic shows that only 16% of our traffic comes from Internet Explorer, and of that 16%, roughly 20% use IE6.
The chart on the left shows that the majority of our users prefer Firefox and the rest use Safari. Surprisingly, this doesn’t mean most of our users are on Macs - instead, Firefox/Windows is still the most popular combination.
This certainly has to do with our audience. We primarily attract high-tech professionals (whether its freelancers, design firms, small businesses) and with that tech-savvy crowd comes the preference for newer, more standards-compliant browsers. In fact, it would be a lie if I told you we didn’t have this fact in mind when we first started Ronin.
Here’s to a new year and leaving behind old worries!
Other companies off the top of my head that have stopped supporting IE6 include Apple’s MobileMe and 37S. As a web developer, I completely support the quick death of IE6, but interestingly enough I know plenty of corporate IT developers who work on internal applications that are only required to work with IE6 because that’s the company’s standard browser.
Eric
3 Jan 09 at 11:44 pm
Eric, that’s why I count my blessings when it comes to Ronin customers - no need to worry about the IE6 IT crowd.
Lu Wang
4 Jan 09 at 1:18 am