IE6 Rests In Peace, A Funeral Is Being Held

Luscious wide open green space, glorious gigantic mountain ranges, sunny tropical beaches. There is so much beauty in the world. So much beauty that you just don't get to see if you are up at 3am wondering why your site looks all side saddle in Internet Explorer 6, despite having a separate style-sheet dedicated for working around its missing CSS features, and generally staying away from anything too fancy anyway. Well, by 5am you figure out its not a IE6 CSS problem, its a IE6 Javascript missing feature. Luckily you found the solution in a blog post from 5 years ago.

I'll spare you the history lesson and technical details, as only developers understand them.

The essence here is that IE6 was holding back progress for so many years, and causing untold numbers of man hours wasted in supporting it. But finally the situation is terminal. Businesses have upgraded to newer versions.

Sometimes as part of increasing their security, as IE6 is often the source of badware and viruses, as it makes it so easy to trick the end user, but also many times just by accident. No computers sold in the last few years would come with IE6. Smart businesses upgraded to IE7 or Firefox so long ago it is not even in their corporate memory.

Ahh, it is a good thing. It's held on for way too long but web developers are an optimistic and enthusiastic bunch by nature and are glad to see it finally
go. In fact, a funeral is being held on March 4th, in Denver Colorado. The body is missing, but the coffin is reported to be 'filled with beer'.

-- David Richards - Microsoft Certified Professional, Former IE6 Debugger