The Microsoft blog post was made in responce to a Digg blog post made a few weeks ago asking visitors to the site using IE6 to comment and vote on why they still use the ageing browser. The results showed that while numbers are decreasing, there are still a lot of people using the browser, a statistic backed up by numerous other sources.

It did however once again highlight that the majority of these users were at work and unable to upgrade it due to internal IT policies and potential cost of upgrading, so the question of “should you support IE6 when building a website” comes down to one thing… Your target audiance.

If your site isn’t aimed at people in the workplace, a social networking site, an online shop or gaming website for example, then you can probably get away with your site not looking or working as flash and fancy as it does in a modern browser, although you should check users can navigate around or display a message advising they re-visit in an alternate browser. If your target audience is the home user… add as much javascript and inline-blocks as you can handle.

I think the news Microsoft will continue to support an out of date version instead of “persuading” office users to upgrade to their flagship browser isn’t in the best interests of itself or its customers, numerous security issues, non-standards compliant..need i go on.

I think the line they have taken that as it comes with a default installation of windows they must support it till the end of that products lifecycle is a blow to developers everywhere and will ensure the pothole on the internet roadmap will be with us for another few years yet.

Hopefully this will release will mark the end of Internet Explorer 6, the bane of website developers everywhere, IE6 is almost 8 years old and now 2 versions behind the stable release, so people still running it are compromising their security with outdated software and disrupting their online experience by using a browser riddled with bugs.

I for one am taking this opportunity to draw a line in the sand and will no longer test my site designs in IE6, I will also be adding a small pop-up message to alert users visiting via IE6 that while they are welcome, they are visiting the site using outdated software and the site may not be compatible, I will also be providing a link to upgrade to IE8 (would be rude not to add a Firefox link as well )

UPDATE: (16/04/09 @ 22:04)

True to my word, if you now visit my website in Internet Explorer versions 7 or below, you will get an Information bar pop-up advsiing to update your browser.

It is believed that the next browser to come out of the Redmond camp will be based on the new and exciting Project Gazelle, recently announced by Microsoft Research.  Gazelle is a completely new browser and has been rebuilt from the ground up. It currently consists of 5,000 lines of C# code, runs with a sandboxed kernal to prevent unauthorised access to the users operating system and uses a multi-process approach to tabs meaning each tab has its own process so if one crashes the whole application doesnt freeze up.

It is also rumoured the new browser will run with webkit (the rendering engine used by safari, opera and google chrome) which is fast becoming the norm for none-IE / Firefox based browsers, I for one hope this doesnt happen as Im not a huge fan of webkit and its many flaws, but then I am an avid firefox fanboi.

Talking of rumours  (this being a theme of this post) IE 8 is expected to be released at Microsoft’s Mix 09 conference next week, Microsoft Taiwan has even given a release date of 20th March.

Having tested Internet Explorer 8 from beta 1 I have to say this is definatly the best version yet and I hope this is pushed out via one of Redmonds Patch Tuesdays as a critical update forcing users to upgrade. I will be adding an “Upgrade to IE8″ message to my site for visitors using IE7 or god forbif IE6.

Further Reading

• Gazelle White Paper