Tom McGee's Blog

37 Sig­nals, a devel­oper of web-based group­ware, is offi­cially phas­ing out sup­port of IE6 in its next gen­er­a­tion of devel­op­ment. The prod­uct of theirs I’m most famil­iar with is Base­camp, a project-management appli­ca­tion which is used in a cou­ple of places I’ve worked.

Unlike the XP-to-Vista migra­tion, IE6 to IE7 is pretty easy across both plat­forms and has lit­tle down­side. Since it comes bun­dled with the reg­u­lar sys­tem upgrades, once the sys­tem admin­is­tra­tor decides to go with it, it just hap­pens. Some­times even before.

The Word­Press page where I orig­i­nally learned this quotes sta­tis­tics show­ing IE7 with a roughly 6–5 lead over IE6. But that’s not at all con­sis­tent across dif­fer­ent audi­ences. For exam­ple, con­sumer sites I mon­i­tor show IE7 rang­ing from a 2–1 lead to a 2–1 deficit. The finan­cial site I mon­i­tor shows IE6 2–1 over IE7. The finan­cial ser­vices area has always been slow to adopt, reflect­ing both a more security-conscious atti­tude as well as a huge embed­ded base of users with mission-critical appli­ca­tions they have to deal with.

Nev­er­the­less, as pop­u­lar web-based appli­ca­tions force the issue for users it’s a good thing for we devel­op­ers, who’ve been eager to get the IE6 mon­key off our backs since about twenty min­utes after it was released in 2001.