The death of IE6

January 5th, 2009 Christine Posted in Web Design |

… much like that of Mark Twain at the time, might be slightly exaggerated.

Although the day is coming when 90% of the effort that is put into the design of a site might for a change NOT be devoted to fixing up cross browser issues.

Heavens, what ARE all these web developers going to do with their time?

According to the latest statistics the use of Internet Explorer 6 has fallen below 20% for the first time this month (December 2008).

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Although of course, also in the words of Mark Twain there are lies, damned lies and statistics…

Nevertheless this is a welcome trend.

As stated, we just wonder what web developers are going to do if they do not specifically have to use hacks, workarounds, extra style sheets, extra effort and so forth to fix up designs to compensate for those special little IE6 quirks such as the way that IE6 handles floats, the extra padding, the positioning problems.

Here are two links to fixing IE6 problems in the mean time:

http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/ie6-core-bug-fixing

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/03/06/10-fixes-for-ie6-problems/

Quite possibly though IE8 will have its own set of problems although all indications seem to be that in general it is an improvement on IE7 and more standards compliant. Time will tell though. Up to now we have not started to explicitly test for IE8 - according to the browser stats the usage of IE8 is still very low (less than 1%).

But it is coming!

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