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Kill Internet Explorer 6 posted: 18 07 09

(Techie rant) Yes believe it or not is the name of a campaign gaining considerable support not only from the most trendy and cutting edge of designers but also in the creative mainstream for the belief that Internet Explorer 6 (current version is now 8) should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

The reason, mainly for its complete lack of support for web standards and the rendering of code written to modern standards, sure there are work arounds, adding IE6 specific style sheets, hacks to handle its inability to handle alpha transparancy in .png files, the list goes on. The growing consensus is that why should we designers have to accommodate browser technology from what in internet terms is a bygone age. Many large sites are now dropping or scaling back support for IE6, site such as Flickr and Facebook are no longer guaranteeing a perfect user experience for those stuck using IE6.

Why spend hours working on an IE6 specific fix for a site, yes fine if it can be worked round in an hour or so but it can not be commercially viable to continue to support outdated technology. Here at 69Design we have some time ago decided not to support IE6, we have progressively moved towards the use of .png image files with alpha transparency to enhance our XHTML sites, as well as no longer providing alternate styling for IE6 users.

Our computers here at 69Design are Apple machines, we develop sites using the Safari and Firefox browsers, and once completed test in Opera and Camino, plus Internet Explorer 7 and 8 for PC’s. It is sometimes difficult enough dealing with the less than perfect support for web standards in IE7 but we do now test for variances. I am sure many of our clients, and readers of this blog will not even be aware that differences exist, trust us they do. So at least for us IE6 is dead, we can only hope the campaign and calls for its demise do indeed bring it to a merciful end.