Tom McGee

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.