Over the last few days I’ve been troubleshooting some CSS styling issues with IE6. This is no different than much of the design and development work I’ve done on web sites and applications over the past several years but this time, I seriously considered not supporting IE6 any longer. I’ve become spoiled but the ever increasing amount of standards compliant web browsers that all render very close to each other with the exception of some minor tweaks. Then we have IE6.

Yesterday, as I ran into a very frustrating bug, it led me to wonder how many wasted hours do web developers spend per day trying to code for IE6? It has to be hundreds hours per day worldwide. This is a browser that is well past it’s life span but for whatever reason continues to have 40% to 70% market share depending on your audience. Is IE6 good enough for that many people that they refuse to upgrade or do they just not know that at the very least IE7 is available to them? Either way, at some point, I think we need to move on with or without these people. For now, I’m going to continue to put fixes in place for IE6 but my patience for this browser is wearing thin. Hopefully sometime soon we can move on from the IE6 nightmare and for me, and I’m sure most web developers/designers, this can’t happen soon enough.