I can guarantee I am not the only web designer thrilled by this milestone. Over the past month, news has circulated widely confirming the definitive death of Internet Explorer 6. Google has joined the anti-IE6 campaign, explicitly stating it will no longer support this nine-year-old browser. When you consider designing CSS and HTML (or XHTML) for clients who insist on IE6, you are severely restricting your creativity. Moreover, maintaining compatibility with IE6 can result in significant costs for your company, as isolating and fixing its numerous bugs is time-intensive and inefficient[1][3].
Google Reader, an RSS service utilizing RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom standards to display feed updates, has ceased supporting Internet Explorer 6 entirely.
“Reader is a cutting-edge Web application, and this will allow us to spend our time improving Reader instead of fixing issues with antiquated browsers,” said Mihai Parparita, an engineer with the Reader team, in a post to group’s blog last Monday[1].
A troubleshooting post on Google Reader’s help page officializes the phase-out of this legacy browser[1].
StatCounter, a leading web analytics company, recently released data showing that Internet Explorer’s market share has continued to dwindle significantly. The percentage of users currently using Internet Explorer 6 has dropped by 4.7%, marking an 11.5% decline from a year ago. These usage trends were derived from over fifteen billion page views recorded in May 2010. Currently, IE7 holds the largest market share, with Firefox 3.6 and IE7 trailing behind[1][3].
A primary reason IE6 persists in some environments is that many corporate users still rely on Windows XP, which ships with Internet Explorer 6. Many companies hesitated to upgrade to Windows Vista, and while Windows 7 is now mature, IT departments often wait for analyst reports confirming the long-term performance of Microsoft’s newer operating systems before migrating[1].
Countless other websites have dropped IE6 support; for instance, YouTube dropped support earlier this year. There is also a dedicated website listing organizations that have dropped IE6 support, where you can add your own site to demonstrate you no longer support this obsolete browser. We have also published several posts detailing Internet Explorer 6 bugs, CSS issues, and XHTML coding challenges[1][5].