IE6 usage in the US has now officially dropped below 1%! Finally, this horrible browser is dead and web developers everywhere can rejoice in not having to work with this outdated browser. I know some businesses still use it but personally, for my work, I’m dropping support for IE6. Trying to work around its limitations was just headache inducing. Sure it creates more work (in some cases, a LOT more work) that I get paid for, but it’s unfulfilling and frustrating work.
The next version to be marked for death should be IE7. I’m happy to hear that this month Microsoft will be auto-updating IE to the latest version for users with auto-update on. So on XP, that’s IE8 and on Vista/7, it’s IE9. It’s not ideal since there will still be many people and business users with auto-update off. But it’s still a huge step. Hopefully this time next year or maybe sooner, IE7 will be on its way out as well.
While businesses hate it, I think it’s great that browsers like Firefox and Chrome are iterating so fast. It forces other vendors to keep up and it’s going to improve the overall quality of websites because with the web we often have to work with the lowest common denominator. And IE6 set the bar abysmally low for an extremely long time.
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