No Matter What the Numbers Say- IE6 Support Here Ends With IE8's Release
Right now Internet Explorer 6 averages about 10-12% of my traffic here (11% for the past month.) While I won't dismantle existing support mechanisms, I will no longer test new features in IE6 and going forward I will not support or test for IE6 for the new version of the site.
The good news is, I rarely do anything here that will tax IE6 heavily and the redesign will likely be architected in such a way that it will probably work pretty well in IE6 even without specific attention. The bad news is, 11% equals about 6000 people and the thought of annoying, even slightly, that many folks over a month worries me. The thing is, I just can't support three versions of a browser, especially when one of them is such an odd man out. IE7/IE8 are comfortably supportable browsers. IE6 plainly sucks.
Spurred on by this:
Microsoft: IE 8 won't be done until 2009
So I've got to draw a line in the sand.
Now if I can just convince them to do the same at work…
You've got my support. But the issue there is that many clients refuse to upgrade from IE6. The same goes for Flash. We recently had to develop something for Flash Player 7.
Yeah, I'm betting we'll be supporting IE6 for another year at least. When it's the default browser on a client's network, we're kind of stuck with it.