At a point in time, when facebook is the internet inside the internet, and when many people think of it as THE internet, rarely using anything else, an interesting thing has happened. Many had pleaded, many had wished for it (especially web developers), and even Microsoft urged for it. No success. Nobody was able to kill Internet Explorer 6, mainly because it’s preinstalled with windows XP and this is still what the majority uses. So all of the office computers, and all the home computers of casual users remained the silent majority of web browsing.
This of course led to websites being done ESPECIALLY for IE6 and for the rest of the world. Twice as much work. Or actually more, since IE6 had it’s humors and wasn’t really following standards, so it was all a hit or miss scenario constantly. And as years have gone by, the usage of IE6 was shrinking, but not fast enough so it’d be convincing for a client to skip IE6 version of the site. Even at 25% of the market (and it still has more than that, significantly more) nobody would decide to skip IE6 version while building a site.
Well until now. A while ago youtube stopped supporting IE6, but most of it worked just fine in IE6 anyway.
Now facebook comes into play, and since it has all those apps and all those quizes the casual user really loves, they’ll see a big difference. And that alone – a decision of a website they spend half their awake time on – can lead them to upgrade. Sure firefox, chrome, safari and opera are better than any IE iteration, but for god’s sake! Make them upgrade to at least IE7 and that, as terrible a browser as it is – is still a huge step for the web world.
IE6 Rest in peace.
