Phasing Out Legacy Browsers
I just read an article this morning which informed that Google will be slowly phasing out Internet Explorer 6 support from all of its offerings by the end of 2010. As a web design firm - we are in full support of this, give it a big thumbs up and would like to say...It's about time!!
To say that we spent a good majority of our developer's time last year making websites or features of websites work in IE6 would be an understatement. We spent countless hours tweaking websites built by Fortune Web, and even eCommerce sites built by our sister company AOS Ware. The eCommerce sites, of course, being the most painful. As you can imagine, there are many, many features that make an eCommerce solution run effectively, most of which work differently across browsers. Coding for IE8, but yet still making sites work in IE6, was a pain - to put it lightly.
Now, that I have sufficiently vented about our troubles with coding across multiple browsers, our company will have no problems whatsoever about following Google to phase out support of IE6. It really comes down to the bottom line....do you spend time, money & resources supporting old legacy browsers, or do you build more complex websites with robust features to support the latest browser versions? Clearly, you go with the latter option. Of course, we will look at browser usage statistics, and for our clients who still have a majority audience of IE6 users, we will probably support it for a bit longer while taking steps to educate that audience on the benefits of an upgrade.
Simply put the latest browser versions from IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome are just more sophisticated than legacy browsers such as IE6. Using a more modern browser will guarantee the user a better experience on the website overall. Things will look better and they will work better.
To those of you still using legacy browsers, we encourage you to upgrade! It takes only minutes, and we promise you won't be sorry!
And to Google...thank you for once again leading the way, we are right behind you!
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