IE6 End of Life at RocketTheme

Written by Andy Miller Monday, 15 June 2009 00:00

Let's face it, Internet Explorer 6 has had a heck of a run. It was originally released on August 27, 2001 just before the release of Windows XP. At the time of it's release it was a pretty fast, efficient and modern browser. It had partial support for CSS level 1, DOM level 1 and SMIL 2.0. Clearly it was not earth-shattering at the time of it's release, and time has not been kind to it since.

Microsoft had complete market dominance with Internet Explorer during this time, and it seemed content to sit on it's haunches and not work towards any kind of compliance in the intervening years. It wasn't until Firefox started to make waves, and began eating away at the browser usage pie, that Microsoft got it's browser development team off the bench and released Internet Explorer 7. This browser was a very small step in the right direction and it was almost universally shunned and all it did was slightly reduce IE6 usage, but certainly was no true competitor to Firefox and the other standards focused browsers in terms of capabilities. Microsoft has now released version 8.0 of it's Internet Explorer product, and even though it stills falls short of most other browsers especially with CSS Level 3 support, it at least has support for CSS Level 2.1. For more detailed information you can check out this great CSS selectors chart

IE6 has long had a reputation of being a security risk. This is mostly due to the extremely long release cycles and the lack of security patches. This has only multiplied over time as the updates get fewer and the number of security exploits increases. There have been numerous articles about these issues, and to this day several issues, including critical ones are left un-patched. this alone should be reason enough to upgrade your browser, but the one that affects our life here at RocketTheme the most is the lack of features and capabilities of this browser.

Supporting Internet Explorer 6 has long been the bane of the web developer. Even without the CSS support, the quirks, bugs, and just plain erroneous handling of common XHTML and CSS elements means that a design that works flawlessly in Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc, requires hours or even days of 'hacking' to get it working reliably on IE6. Also due to features that are just not available in IE6, designers often have to sacrifice design elements or layouts entirely just to ensure that IE6 viewers are not left with a big mess on their displays. It's long been said that IE6 is holding back the web, and this has never been truer than it is today. The latest versions of Chrome, Safari 4, Firefox 3.5, and Opera 10 support innovative features that allow web applications be in the same league as their desktop counterparts. Many business, organizations, and even entire countries have already made a stand and have stopped supporting IE6 on their sites and applications. Now it's RocketTheme's turn.

As of January 1st, 2010, RocketTheme will no longer be creating templates, themes, extensions, etc, that support Internet Explorer 6. We will however continue to support IE6 in our existing templates released up to this point. Internet Explorer 8 is slowly but surely increasing it's market share and IE6 is on a slow but steady decline in usage. According to w3schools.com, from the high in November 2003 of 71.2%, IE6 usage had dropped to 32% in January of 2008, and 18.5% in January 2009. By January 2010, this percentage should be around 6-8%. With the introduction of Windows 7 this fall, this percentage could be even lower. This usage will never truly dwindle to an inconsequential percentage until all the large sites on the internet stop supporting it. People are generally averse to change, and if things seem to be working, their is no incentive to change or upgrade. An eight year old software product is positively ancient in technology terms, and the upgrade path to IE8, Firefox, Chrome etc is easy and free. The hold outs are almost entirely corporations who have legacy applications that require IE6 broken rendering engine, but now is the time for those businesses to upgrade their core applications or get left behind. To wrap up, here's a quote I'm particularly fond of:

Update: Jakub has created this very handy OS X dashboard widget so you can see the countdown to IE6 End of Life day in realtime: RTIE6Countdown.zip. Enjoy!