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.
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.
The people still running IE6 are likely the same users that happily install any piece of spyware and open executable attachments from untrusted sources. If a couple of high traffic sites stopped supporting IE6 and showed a "click here to install IE7" the IE6 market share would disappear almost overnight.
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. ;)
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.
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
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.
