Stop! Creative Group

Stop Creative Group drops support for IE6

The scourge of web designers, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) is dying a slow and long overdue death as increasing numbers of web design companies choose to no longer support it. Well, in an effort to force Microsoft to start adopting W3C standards we too have chosen to stop officially supporting IE6 for our new websites.

Why are we doing this and what does it mean? Read on…

Did you know that the same website can look different on different computers or even on the same computer when viewed using different browsers? Layouts change, font types and sizes change, buttons and links behave differently, images become skewed or even vanish altogether. That’s right, check out you’re favourite website on a Mac, then on a PC and it looks different, look at it in Internet explorer on your PC then switch to firefox, it looks different again. Even different versions of the same browser can have an effect, IE6 looks different from IE7 which is different from IE8.

As websites become increasingly advanced and geared for the best possible user experience, it’s increasingly important that browsers behave consistently when displaying text, images and other types of rich media commonly found on the web today. Step forward W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium), the organisation set up to put in place rules and standards for web browsers and web designers. Great you might think, but there is one company that is not playing ball, you guessed it…Microsoft. Why? well back in the days when nobody was any the wiser, Microsoft used to bundle (Illegally as s turns out) Internet explorer as part of the Windows operating system, and because window’s market share was well over 90% of computers, they had a stranglehold on the browser market and decided they would ignore the W3C and set their own standards. Over the last few years, Internet Explorer’s share of the browser market has tumbled as people searching for a better surfing experience have switched to standards compliant browsers such as Firefox, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. To their credit (albeit 5 years late), Microsoft have realised that they are loosing the browser battle and are gradually bringing their browser in to line, the latest version of Internet Explorer (IE8) is certainly a marked improvement on what came before, and truly shows up IE6 as the useless piece of crap it always was. And that is why we have joined the ranks and dropped support for IE6, goodbye and good riddance.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

http://www.w3.org/

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html

http://www.apple.com/safari/

http://www.google.com/chrome