About a month ago, we reached one of those crossroads in the development of our (coming very soon) content management solution. Our development process is typically to develop a perfect standards-compliant site and then reverse-engineer a working Internet Explorer copy out of that–usually through painstaking pixel-by-pixel corrections of obscure bugs in IE-specific stylesheets, but also in rare cases where we had to make compromises with the design or markup of the page.
But IE stylesheets can only get you so far. When working with a public-facing website design you just need to get it right once: we make sure the structure is flexible and adaptable and forward-looking, but mainly we build to the best standards of the current day. But because development of our backend solution will be continuous (that’s a hint about a major feature, by the way), continuing to tie ourselves to IE6’s sundry limitations would be crippling down the road.
All this is to say that we’ve made a careful and tentative decision to drop IE6 support for the backend web app. The software is seven years old and was buggy when it was released; its replacement is already two years old. Still, requiring a more modern browser felt somewhat risky: about 20% of visitors to the public pages of a small liberal arts college are still on IE6; at a major research university, the portion is slightly higher. But we decided that a fully-fledged rich “web application” can have different requirements than a public site, and now we see that we’re in good company: both Apple in MobileMe) and 37signals (in all their apps) have decided to drop support for IE6. Hopefully this will be the start of a sorely-needed chain-reaction–it’s clear that the catalyst is not going to come from Microsoft, which is not at all interested in pushing the upgrade, even with version 8 on the horizon.
So if you’re using IE6, might we suggest an upgrade to Firefox, Safari, or IE7? Your web experience will be leagues better. And you’ll be able to play with our new toy as soon as we release it, just around the corner.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Respond to this post.