A Call to Disarm: Deep-six IE6
Posted by andreaitis on March 20, 2009
Call it a browserout.
Listen up, Microsoft: We’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it anymore! I can barely find enough time to whine about IE7 issues, let alone IE6. There are pros and cons, of course…but this is a direct shot in the browser war. Will IE6 go down?
Ultimately, the long tail of obsolete browser usage is nothing new: it’s just the level of standards in the rest of the current leading pack that causes frustration when IE6 looms into view. “IE6 is the new Netscape 4,” reasons Jeff Zeldman, one of the main guys responsible in the 1990s for beating browser makers with the standards stick until they started to play ball. He considers that in a perfect world, designing with web standards means not needing to exclude any browser or device. “But in practice, the hacks needed to support IE6 vis-a-vis display and behaviour are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web. How much longer we prop up this ageing browser must be decided on a case-by-case basis. Not every site can afford to dump it today, but the writing’s on the wall.”
de.tech.ting 
Joseph Hayden said
I was completely oblivious to the IE hostility until I started developing — now I can’t even stand the thing for personal use.
This may knock my cred down a few notches, but I actually think Safari is the perfect browser at the moment, especially since it appears to share a common framework with Chrome.