37signals waves goodbye to IE6
37signals, the Web company best known for Basecamp and Ruby on Rails (which I believe all of their products is written in) has recently announced that it is to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6 across all of its product lines, starting from August 15th.
From a Web standards point of view, I’m happy to see this sort of action being taken by a reasonably influential company. I completely agree with their argument that IE 6 is a last-generation browser (released in 2001), and that having to support it means that some new features will be difficult or perhaps even impossible to implement. Furthermore, it’s hardly difficult to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer, or download an alternative such as Firefox, Safari or Opera (all have free versions), and perhaps if a company has to upgrade for Basecamp it will appreciate the benefits of faster and more secure browsing on other sites too.
However, from a business perspective, I’m not so sure that phasing out support for a browser which still commands a significant proportion of the market is a sensible idea. Perhaps 37signals have virtually no clients using IE 6 (they claim “below a small minority threshold of our customers”, though that could mean anything really), but this is a fairly major change to make given only a month’s notice. Having said that, any company which relies on the services provided by 37signals will probably just upgrade their browsers anyway, so perhaps it’s not going to impact their bottom line too much. The general feeling on the Web seems to be that people are glad that 37signals are taking a lead on this, but that not everyone is in a position to drop support for IE 6 as a larger percentage of their customers are still using that browser and can’t upgrade, either because of policy restrictions (using their browser at work where application installations are controlled by a central authority) or simply not knowing how to.
Further reading
- IE6 Independence? – Matt has some interesting statistics from WordPress.com, which suggest that around 27% of people visiting that site still use IE 6.
[...] On the other hand, supporting old IE versions isn’t entirely straightforward. They’re difficult to debug for (particularly on a mac) and standards non-compliance means that otherwise simple fixes become unpredictable. The expense was enough, for instance, for 37signals to cease supporting IE6. Furthermore, I believe that non-compliant browsers should be opposed as a matter of principle, as many others have argued before me. [...]
Ozan's blog » This blog is broken on IE6 and I don’t care
12 Jul 08 at 3:33 pm