Goodings Media

Microsoft officially released internet explorer 8 today after running a Beta release for quite some time now. With this news, Goodings Media Ltd. have decided to finally drop support for internet explorer 6. What does this mean for our customers?

Firstly, lets point out that IE6 quirks are mostly CSS (cascading style sheets) related, with the occasional javascript bug. We’re not talking about any major functionality bugs.

Basically, this means your projects are likely to be cheaper. With internet explorer 8, every windows user in the market will slowly start to upgrade. This means IE7 users to IE8, and IE6 users to IE8. While we know from past experience that uptake wont be total and wont be instant (the fact that some people still use IE6 proves this) we do know that this will finally be the death of IE6. Though some may stay on IE7, and we will continue supporting IE7, the time we spend on projects fixing IE6 quirks is valuable time. It’s time we could spend improving the user interface, or adding those “like to have” features in the spec you sent us. It’s time we don’t have to charge for, which is extra money towards your marketing budget. All in all, IE6 support costs are rather significant on any front end website design. We would like to remove this cost, and pass the saving onto our users and their project.

Of course, any clients who specifically request their site is bug free in IE6 can still do so, but by default now our browser support will be for IE7, IE8, Safari 3, Safari 4, Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.

Update: It seems we weren’t the only developers to drop IE6 support today