It was a long journey to this point. Since 2001 (more than 7 years) IE6 was the webdevelopers constant companion. Within the last years it more or less transformed into webdevelopers constant nightmare. Countless hours went into “fixing” modern CSS layouts to render correctly in IE6.

Over time you somewhat get used to the IE6 quirks but then there is the fact that IE6 natively does not support alpha channel transparency in PNGs which make the realization of nowadays webdesigns a real torture. Spending endless hours on integrating IE6 only hacks and applying PNG hacks.

Not anymore.

From this day I will not support IE6 with IE6 specific / IE6 only acks anymore. Of course I will test layouts for full compliance with IE6 in terms of functionality but don’t expect any additional CSS rule for IE6 only.

I am happy that during the last months I seldomly had to apply any IE6 hacks on new templates. But from time to time there was just no way around an ugly “fix”. This will stop now.

Maybe it’s too early.

The statistics of my websites tell me that depending on the website topic there are between 10 and 25 % of users still using IE6. I think that number is not quite accurate. My guess is that there are some bots/spiders sending IE6 browser info.

I know at least one big enterprise forcing staff to use IE6 and I just don’t get it why. Waiting for some months for adopting new software is even recommended in most companies but not rolling out at least IE7 when IE8 gets already shipped with Windows7 is beyond my comprehension. There must be some reason but don’t ask me for it. I just have no clue.

If offending about every 10th visitor with an inferior rendering of transparent layouts is the only risk then I guess I’ll take it. At least google already decided to start the dropping of IE6 (although it’s only a recommendation – I don’t think they don’t care about IE6 at all). I hope many other big web outlets are following soon.