So Long Internet Explorer 6 (Almost)

Seems like everyone is dropping support for IE6 these days. Apple with MobileMe, 37Signals with Basecamp; even Google with Gmail. What gives? Well, it’s 7 years old for starters. In technology years, that’s like 247 years old! It’s much less secure than the other major browsers. It’s javascript support is wonky at best. And it’s CSS (layout) support? The stuff of horrible, kill-you-in-your-sleep legend.

Is it really that bad? Unfortunately, yes it is. Let’s just say that at least 15-25% of our time goes to fixing bugs in IE6, even when what we’ve coded is valid and adheres to the W3C standards. You start breaking that down and that’s a lot of time and money that’s being wasted for a 7 year old browser with 20% market share (and declining).

Now on the other hand; we do understand that some IT departments won’t let businesses upgrade; and that’s not the users fault. We realize that saying we won’t support IE6 at all in the future is irresponsible and not realistic. But we’ve got to draw the line somewhere, right?

So here’s the deal; starting this year we’re going to charge an extra fee for IE6 support. It will depend on the type and size of the project, but should be equivalent to 15% of the development cost since that’s about how much time it takes. There, I’ve said it. Do what you will to me.

What do you think? Are we not going far enough? Are we destroying the internets? Or is it a good compromise? Tell us in the comments.