The Life and Times of Internet Explorer 6

Over at the design-oriented Smashing Magazine site, you’ll find Brad Colbow’s comic, The Life and Times of Internet Explorer 6. It’s the browser we all love to hate, including we who collect a nice fortnightly deposit from Microsoft into our bank accounts. I got a great laugh at DemoCamp Toronto 21 when I said “If you got a cat when IE6 came out, it’s dead now.”

It wasn’t always this way, as the first section of the comic shows (you can click it to read the whole thing):

There’s a fair bit of history covered in the middle section of the comic, but I feel that the most important sections are the first (shown above), and the end, shown below:

That is the real question: “Can we stop supporting IE6 yet?”, followed by a real answer: You have to look at your audience. If you can drop IE6 support without ruining the experience for the majority your audience (you have to make the call on what constitutes a majority), then by all means, go for it.

Expecting people outside our industry to have as much interest in browser technology is about as fair as my insurance agent expecting me to have as much interest in the ins and outs of insurance as he does. I only care about the amount of coverage, the deductible, the slip of paper that goes into my glove compartment, and how much I have to pay a year. Everything else is just yappity-yap from some suit who’s interrupting my work day, trying to show me pages of boring legalese. That’s how we look to most end users.

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]