End of Life for Internet Explorer 6. Please.

So Microsoft has decided to begin the push of IE8 to all the unsuspecting windows users through their automatic update service and once again has done us a marginal favor out of their own necessity for relevance. With IE6 now two generations antiquated, many of the developers in the community are finding fewer reasons to humor the predominance of the broken application for any reason. Having dealt with huge corporate clients when developing web sites, even in 2009 I still get the excuse that IE6 must still be supported because it litters the workstations of their huge corporate networks, either from stubborn familiarity or a misguided cost savings attempt. I and many other developers have wasted endless hours that we will never get back tracking down bizarre css and javascript errors as well as tedious tactics to try and accommodate IE6 for not doing anything the way the rest of the world expects. With the release of version 8, IE6 has shown its age now entering its eighth year of existence which in regards to software is damn near ancient and given the dynamic nature of the web as it is intended, it really should have faded from mainstream use many years ago. But all of this, I’m certain, is serving to do nothing more than preach to the choir so forgive the rant.

The intention of this post is more or less to serve as a formal declaration of my intention as a web developer at a major digital agency that I intend to start an initiative to drop support for IE6. My personal strategy is start with the expectation that only standards compliant web browsers will be supported and additional browsers that require extreme hardship to support should be charged for accordingly. If I were running things I would make the costs prohibitive and down right punitive but I have only my opinion to sway others but I feel that it’s important to set the expectations out on the web from the onset.

I have started engaging in the tactics cited here by a sampling of norwegian web sites, by displaying annoying banners to IE6 users in order to raise awareness of their obsolescence. The problem is most people aren’t aware they are using broken software so it seems unfair to expect people to change when they see no problem. These banners are a perfect tool to participate in this campaign and do your part to rid the world of the scourge that is IE6. All of my blogs utilize this warning mechanism and I encourage everyone else involved with web development to do the same.