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]