When we started the development of this site we were faced with a tough decision. The dilemma involved making the site compatible with Internet Explorer 6.
There were a few reasons for keeping it:
- By being IE 6 compatible we would have a larger audience
- Its good practice to have 'backward compatibility'
- Potential clients visiting this site may question our development skills. (Truth is that all the sites we have developed up to now are IE6 compatible)
Since the announcement that 37signals will no longer support IE6 we can see a trend developing with developers dropping its support. IE6 is way out of date with current web standards, in our opinion it is like creating a windows program which needs to support DOS. Surely it is time to move on?
Initially we felt a bit of stress by dropping IE6 but now that our site is almost complete, and with the features we plan to implement, we are glad that we don't have to dedicate hours and hours of time to make the features compatible with the old beast. We also looked at the statistics of all the websites that we have developed and have noticed a steady decline in Explorer 6 users. In fact some sites have less than 30% of the users using it.
We know that we will get some flaming for it and that we have potentially lost 30% - 60% of possible readers but we are not too worried. Hopefully more and more developers will start doing the same so that one day the possible loss of readers is only 20%.
So for those who are currently on Internet Explorer 6 and have manged to read this post we strongly encourage you to upgrade!
You will be thanking us for it if you do.
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