Anand’s blog

There seems to be a growing movement on the web to stop supporting the IE6 browser. I couldn’t be any happier. Supporting IE6 sucks time like no other. Even though IE6 was first released in 2001, it still has a large fan following. We, at burrp!, have a healthy 30% of our users who use IE6 to access our site.

There could be several reasons for using IE6 as your browser (see the chart below)

Why people still use IE6

This poses a dilemna in our minds. Should we continue to support IE6? Apart from IE6 (Win), we also test our products on IE7 (Win), Firefox 3 (Win/Mac), Firefox 2 (Win), Safari (Mac), Opera, . Testing the product with these many browsers takes up time. Specially supporting IE6 by far takes up the most amount of time. There are several hacks we’ve put in our CSS to support IE6. With the newer versions of several browsers coming out, we’ll have to test even more.

I’ve been tempted in the past to drop IE6 support totally. But I cannot disappoint 30% of our audience. Specially, if they can’t upgrade due to one of the above reasons.

With popular sites like Digg and Youtube taking this bold step, we might also bite the bullet. But first I need to see a drop off in the IE6 usage to less than 10% levels. Keeping my fingers crossed.