Time To Drop Designing for IE6?

June 10, 2008

I’ve been a proponent of steadily phasing out IE6 support but too many of my clients (and their at-home usability testers, hah) have IE6 inadvertently installed on their machines. You don’t know how many times I walk a client or friend through Help > About Internet Explorer and ask them to read me the version number and I was shocked to hear that they were still using IE6. “You should download Firefox or the latest IE 7.0 if you must,” I’d repeat again. A few years ago, IE6 users had more reason to gripe– it was installed on most machines at their workplace (businesses who’s windfall profits in the 90’s left their employees on Win98 machines with the latest in browsing technoloy; IE6!)

But it’s no longer the nineties, and after Facebook started recommending IE7 to IE6 users, Apple recently dropped it entirely for MobileMe service and others my ears have started perking up. I mean, Microsoft realease IE7 as a “high priority update” for Windows XP users, so that an automatic update was likely done on millions of machines. Continue reading ‘Time To Drop Designing for IE6?’