IE6 Support Dropped by 37Signals design

37Signals made some noise a few days ago when they announced they would begin cutting support for Internet Explorer 6 on all of their products starting in August. This prompted a response from Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress. Matt broke down the Wordpress.com audience and discovered that 27% of all Wordpress.com traffic over the past year has been from users using IE6. The percentage was down a great deal from the previous year, but still 27% is a great chunk of visitors when you’re getting millions. At 27% you would probably still want to be developing for IE6 - 37Signals made their decision because there were very few customers remaining who are still using IE6 - but at any percent, when will everyone be able to say they could stop worrying about things being perfect on IE6?

I say now.

You do not need to be tech savvy or up to date on what is new in the internet world to know IE6 in an absolute piece of shit.

IE6 is out of date, insecure, and the absolute worst when it comes to rendering web pages. With all the accessibility and web standards talk out there, most designers and developers feel they are obligated to make sure their sites look the same way in IE6, IE8, Firefox, Safari, and etc. IE6 generally screws with those ideas, as your design will be looking great in every browser except IE6, and then you have to go back and work out the bugs for the sake of the IE6 population that still remains. 7 years after it was released, why the hell is anyone still using IE6 to begin with? Laziness. You do not need to be tech savvy or up to date on what is new in the internet world to know IE6 in an absolute piece of shit. Why anyone would continue to use it when there are modern alternatives out there (and ones that don’t need a valid Windows license) that display sites like they are supposed to be displayed to everyone regardless of the platform or browser is beyond me.

To say that someones system specs force them to use IE6 is also bullshit. There are modern browsers that will work with just about any system setup no matter how old, and considering brand new computers are no longer thousands of dollars, I’m not sure how many people really let their technology get that old any more.

So when will IE6 use fully stop and when can we stop developing for it? Never. Until the web decides to fully cut support for IE6 across the board, people will still use it. 10 minutes is just too long to download a newer browser when you can have the award-winning abilities IE6 presents you with.