New Internet Explorer Support Policy
Back in February we announced our decision to cease support of IE 6 on this day, August 27th 2010 — the day Internet Explorer 6 celebrates it’s 9th birthday. That’s approximately 900 browser years, so needless to say IE 6 is tired and ready to slip away peacefully in it’s sleep.
In the last year, IE 8 has shot up nearly 300% to grab an overall 30% of the world wide market share while IE 7 and IE 6 have dived close to 200% each, sitting at 15% and 9% in the global market share, respectively. With such a downturn in both IE 6 and IE 7 I see no reason to support either one. While IE 6 had real reasons — infrastructure, intranet, administrative — that kept it in the offices, there is absolutely no excuse not to update IE 7.
The New Support Policy
For this reason we are now adopting a single browser-version support policy. Only the most current browser version will be supported from each browser vendor, with only marginal overlap as new browsers versions transition in.
This has long since been our policy for all other modern browsers — Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera — and this is now true of Internet Explorer. Only the latest version of IE will be supported at any given time.
We now officially support:
- Chrome 5+
- Firefox 3.6+
- Internet Explorer 8+
- Opera 10.6+
- Safari 5+
Raise a Glass
So let’s raise a glass in memory of IE 6. Let’s celebrate the bold new paths it forged, the standards it helped create, the frustration it caused, the many sleepless nights, the curses it formed in the mouths of developers, the anger it boiled up in normally calm, turtle-neck wearing designers who just wanted pretty, not pretty ugly…
On second thought, just kick IE 6 in the nuts and send it down the Ganges.
[tags]Internet Explorer,support,IE 6,IE 7[/tags]
That’s gotta feel good. Freeing. I’ll lift my glass and say, “Good riddance.”
Good for you
Way to take a stand….and rightfully so. There is no reason not to update your browser
Doing some research, accuracy may be up for grabs, but for myself and I think many others Global stats are not that terribly important to us. I recent broke it down for August 2010 in the USA and the figures for IE6 were only 3.86%. IE7 Came in at 13.96% and showing dropping like a rock.
My biggest concern is though while dropping Win XP is at 34% in USA and 54% Globally. Netbooks have forced MS to continue support for XP is my guess at any rate the deadline keeps getting extended. My bottom line with all this is IE9 is not scheduled to run on XP and even at 34% XP is still the most widely used OS in the USA. Once IE9 gets here with your current plan for support IE 8 basically won’t be supported at all if I understand you correctly. I’d like to see it go too, but realistically I see a potential problem here for any professional use.
I’m hoping you can address this directly Adam and separate fact from fiction in my notes.
We’ll address the OS vs browser version when the time comes. For now it’s not a great concern as IE 9 has yet to be released. Also, there are plenty of browsers that do run on XP (all modern browsers do) so I suspect that in the end, MS won’t be willing to leave that slice of the pie to their competitors, especially on their home turf.
Just wanted to add my stats source, again not sure of accuracy at all.
http://gs.statcounter.com/
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Adam — Good decision. Nice piece of writing. Congratulations. I’ll toast to that.
IE 6 will be remembered. It is great that you adopted such a policy. It is hoped that many still in the dark ages of IE 6 will see the light.