IE6 Must Die

Its been coming for a long time, the slow painful death of IE6. As the web continues to grow and change it becomes necessary to retire those old dinosaurs who have become more of a pain to use than a benefit. As a developer its a tiring process to make sure your pages run on every browser, but if everyone just dropped support for it we could get rid of this pesky browser for good.

Benn Parr @mashable wrote:

Just six years ago, the web was dominated by one browser: Internet Explorer (Internet Explorer), specifically Internet Explorer 6. Without Netscape to compete against it and the ability to bundle its browser with Windows XP, Microsoft experienced superior market share – up to 95% at the peak. Today though, we have far superior browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome, as well as Internet Explorer 8.

So why is 15 to 25 percent of the world’s browsing still done in a browser created in the digital Stone Age (aka 2001)? As a coder, designer, and UI guy, it’s difficult to put into words how many extra man hours I and others have dedicated to make websites compatible with the outdated browser.

Despite the difficulty presented by IE6 though, the web’s done alright. But with the coming release of HTML 5, we’re about to hit a breaking point where innovation will be stifled if websites must continue to cater to this browser. Here’s what’s happening in the next few months and, more importantly, why we must force ourselves off IE6 if the web is to grow.

The internet is growing and changing, and getting smarter every day, so to help the process we have to wean people off of old browsers like a baby from a bottle.

more about how to kill IE6 @mashable