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| Drop IE6? Depends. Google has sent designers into a tizzy today by announcing that from March 1st, they're going to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 in Docs and Sites. It's the first in a very long row of stepping stones before the death of one of the most polarizing (and hated) pieces of software of our time can finally be put to rest. However, should designers throw IE6 support out completely? No. If you're designing a site for a client, it needs to be tailored to their specifcation, not "web concensus". Sure, it takes a lot of effort to hack a site to work nicely on IE6, but if the client requires it, it's...well...a requirement. Say the client has 10% of users still rocking IE6, but they get 100,000 uniques pcm - that's 10k people that would get the chop (that's actually a realistic figure by the way). Most people on IE6 either don't know anything different (in which case, polite flash-message reminders to upgrade would work), or are large corporations that will keep their implementation until they feel the time is right. Cutting IE6 support should be based on a case-by-case basis, not a lock-stock decision. Again, say a large corporation wants to check out your portfolio, they go to some sites on their IE6 window, see them all as ugly and move onto the next designer who's made theirs work for the target market. Just because Google's begun removing support for it from some of their web properties (which really couldn't be used in IE6 anyway), doesn't mean it's going to disappear from the web altogether. If they were announcing they'd cripple anyone's search ability if they were rocking it, it'd be a different story. This post has 1727 characters, and was posted by @stevefarnworth You must be signed in to comment |