Steve and I have long been fans of the guys over at 37signals. We manage our Bscopes development in Basecamp. We purchased and (figuratively) devoured Getting Real. (I literally get ill when people misuse literally :- ) And faithfully read their Signal vs Noise blog.
They wrote a post last week discussing how they’ll soon be dropping support for IE 6. That got me thinking. I love the idea of not having to code up css hacks. Of not worrying about non standard Javascript or layout. Not that all the other browsers are perfect. They aren’t. But if you just look at IE 7, Firefox and Safari, then you get a much more uniform set of browsers to support.
Steve and I talked it over. He pointed out just how old IE 6 is now. I wasn’t even sure anyone visiting Bscopes used IE 6. So I checked. We get about 40% of our visitors who use IE, 40% who use Firefox and 20% who use Safari. And when I looked deeper, the 40% IE usage was 34% IE7 and 6% IE 6. And it’s not clear if the 6% using IE 6 are really using the site or just passing through. Their time on site stats and pages/visit are less than half the typical users statistics.
So we decided that we would follow suit. We won’t be specifically coding Bscopes to support IE 6 any more. It might work. It might not. We suggest the few people still using IE 6 upgrade to IE 7 as soon as they can.
Beyond that, we’ll continue to try and stay as standards compliant as we can. And as browser and os independent as we can. After all, what else is a Web 2.0 site for?
Back to (compliantly) coding up new features…
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