

Apple's MobileMe drops support for IE6 - pistoriusp
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1072-apples-mobileme-drops-support-for-ie-6
I'm also hoping that this is the beginning of a trend.
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pistoriusp
I'm also hoping that this is the beginning of a trend. Begone IE6!

~~~
mechanical_fish
And people wonder why Steve Jobs and the Apple engineers get worshiped like
gods.

Here's Andy Hertzfeld, from _Triumph of the Nerds_ :

 _Steve was upset that the Mac took too long to boot to boot up when you first
turned it on, so he tried motivating Larry Kenyon by telling him: Well, you
know how many millions of people are going to buy this machine - it's going to
be millions of people - and let's imagine that you can make it boot five
seconds faster. Well, that's five seconds times a million every day. That's
fifty lifetimes. If you can shave five seconds off that, you're saving fifty
lives. And so it was a nice way of thinking about it, and we did get it to go
faster._

The less time it takes to make IE6 officially obsolete, the more developer
lives will be saved.

~~~
aston
Now Apple's visionary for deciding not to support a browser? The reality
distortion field is stronger here than I thought.

When you're building a product for customers, the last thing you should be
concerned about is saving developer time if it means your less savvy customer
base is giving you enough money to make that time worth it.

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mechanical_fish
_When you're building a product for customers, the last thing you should be
concerned about is saving developer time if it means your less savvy customer
base is giving you enough money to make that time worth it._

Unless your strategy is to release a product that can convince less-savvy
customers to _join the ranks of the savvy_... perhaps by junking their creaky
old Windows software and upgrading to something nicer and more modern. Like,
say, one of those shiny Macs at the Apple Store.

You're right, this kind of nonlinear thinking is not a rational strategy for
most of us individual website developers. It's only a rational strategy if
you've got enormous chutzpah and the ability to create and sell products that
_warp_ the market rather than merely adapt to it.

 _The reality distortion field is stronger here than I thought._

God, I hope so.

Yes, it's hyperbole to call this move by Apple "visionary" -- just as it's
kind of hyperbolic to claim that shaving ten seconds off the Mac's boot time
is a matter of life and death. So be it. I will gleefully countenance any
amount of reality distortion, social engineering, and breathless handwaving in
the name of reducing the browser share of IE6 as quickly as possible. I'm sure
many of my fellow CSS designers agree with me.

So let the word go forth: Only squares, and people who still use words like
"squares", use IE6. Your friends are secretly laughing at your IE6. IE6 is
responsible for most of the evil in the world today. Steve Jobs hates IE6. DHH
hates IE6. The Pope hates IE6. According to generally reliable Internet
sources [1], Bruce Schneier, Chuck Norris, and Paul Graham disdain IE6.
Everytime you launch IE6, God kills a kitten.

[1] i.e., me, but only when I'm not being intentionally hyperbolic. ;)

~~~
commandar
Three words: Safari trojan horse.

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dimitry
Voted up to start a trend. IE8 beta 2 is going public this August for christ's
sake (aimed at general public, not developers)!

I can't endure this IE6 crap for too much longer.

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nickb
I hope other big companies drop support as well. It would immensely simplify
all of our lives if we didn't have to support that crappy old browser.

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gcv
It's definitely a growing trend. Google doesn't seem to support IE6 in the new
Gmail interface (the old interface and the HTML-only still work).

If you're building a new app and don't have stringent compatibility
requirements from your customers (a government contract for a site designed
for people who might still run Win98 and use IE5), I don't see any reason to
bother with IE6 compatibility anymore. The small number of extra customers you
gain is unlikely to be worth the developer time.

~~~
sharksandwich
Maybe others are blessed with a more favorable browser distribution than I am,
but I certainly couldn't afford to drop IE6. About 23% of my site's visitors
use it

~~~
gcv
Maybe you can afford to offer IE6 users stripped down functionality? Even some
of Microsoft's sites don't fully support IE6 anymore. There's a bunch of
functionality disabled under IE6 in the MS map offering (Live Maps, or
whatever it's called), for example.

