Dropping Support for old Browsers
on Jun 06 in Blog, News by Phoenix_ws
Image via Wikipedia
Over the past few months I have noticed how Microsoft have tried to campaign to promote companies and people to upgrade their browser to the latest version of Internet Explorer (IE). Their main reason is due to the large amount of security issues that IE6 had and the newer versions since have fixed. I cannot believe in this day and age the technology on the web changes at a supersonic rate that a browser that is around 10 years old is still being used to the point that people still want to have their website supported. As of today the amount of people using IE6 is 10.9% of the world which is still quite a lot and countries like China and Korea are the worst offenders.
Most Web Design companies are scrutinised by their peers and other people in the industry for wanting to drop support for certain versions of browsers. Personally I do not support IE6 at all it doesn’t support modern methods or even early versions of CSS it has endless bugs like the float, margin and no support for PNG’s. Some developers believe you should have different versions of websites and offer less functioning websites to people that have older browsers, but this can be time consuming and cost money that really shouldn’t have to be spent on browsers that should be extinct.
Two large companies in the last month have announced that they will drop support for older browser like IE7 and below, Firefox 3.5 and below and also early versions of safari. WordPress was the first with Google Apps coming in close second. Both this year will drop support for these early browsers meaning that although some features will still work, Google apps are taking the more serious approach, making a lot of functionality usable in certain old browsers and over the next year or so functionality will be dropped 100% so they will not be able to use Gmail or any of Google Apps if you try on old browsers.
WordPress are taking a more gentle approach and have stated that due to the work load to get WordPress admin to function in IE6 is becoming too complex and time consuming with the rate technology is evolving. Users will have access to wordpress but the admin area will have its functionality reduced. Hopefully this is the beginning of large companies that agree with a large amount of people in the industry that one way or the other we need to lead people to understand the reasons behind upgrading new browsers, as a lot of people do not know why it needs to be done.
Related articles
- Google Apps To Pull Support For Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, And Safari 3 (techcrunch.com)
- WordPress.com Drops Support for IE6 (mashable.com)
