Attirbution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohdesign/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Get off of it. Don’t ask questions; just do it.
By now, it should be obvious to anyone with even a passing knowledge of better and more stable alternatives that Internet Explorer 6 is a husk of a web browser. It is no more. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life, it rests in peace… You get the idea.
It used to be that IE6 was little more than a nuisance. Sure, Firefox was better, and so were Safari and Opera, and it was a veritable pain in the ass to have to write conditional CSS simply to cater to those folks clinging to a browser released with Windows XP in 2001, but while these nuisances existed, for a long time, they were not so egregious as they are now. In my worthless opinion, the browser battle really comes down to a face-off between Firefox and Chrome. IE8 and Opera can’t hold a candle to them, and while Safari has undergone some nice improvements, I don’t think it’s in the same league.
That’s not what I’m on about here, though. The rise of HTML5 is going to bring with it a number of innovations that will require the operational power of the newer and more robust browsers, and the reluctance to shut down a historical relic will hinder this progress. IE6 also contains a number of security vulnerabilities that continue to compound as the browser grows obsolete. Luckily, large websites and even some governments (Germany) are finally dropping IE6 support, and Mashable has dedicated a tag to its demise: IE6 Must Die. Even Microsoft has finally called for users to upgrade.
Click around and read some of the articles on Mashable. You’ll see why we need to leave this thing behind in order to move forward.
While there has been some debate as to how effective this tactic is, anyone who runs their own blog or website can contribute in some small way by installing one of a number of plugins/apps that alert visitors still on IE6 to upgrade their browser. Naturally, change is going to be spurred more rapidly by large sites with heavy traffic dropping support, but you know what they say about drops in a bucket. Every one of them counts.
As of February 2010, IE6 still maintained around a 20% market share.
