Random Flux

I think the time has come for web developers everywhere to rebel against the tyranny of Internet Explorer, particularly the older versions (6 and before). We’re all donating hours of valuable working time making modern websites backward-compatible with IE6 for freeloaders who are feeding off of our work. The time has come to just say No.

Freeloaders? That’s right. Companies that still use IE6 are freeloaders feeding off your work.

Many companies still use IE6 because they wrote their own web apps for IE and they won’t run on anything else. These companies can afford to go on using IE6 because they know that responsible designers like you and me are going to accommodate them. Instead of updating their own apps to work on real browsers, they are letting us do all the work for them. And last time I looked, they weren’t paying us anything for the favor.

So let’s get free and dump the freeloaders. Just say No. Stop making your pages backward-compatible and include an automatic message for IE6 users telling them they’re going to have to use a real browser if they want to view your site. If companies still don’t want to update their crappy IE6-only sites there’s nothing to prevent them from using IE6 internally, but if they want to be part of the civilized world they’re going to have to install a real browser like Firefox or Safari as well to view real websites.

In fact, stop making your pages IE compatible at all. If your code validates and you use the right doctype and meta tags and IE7 and IE8 are still the only browsers that display your site wrong, then to hell with them. The same thing applies to Microsoft that applies to the IE6 freeloaders: If IE doesn’t display a validated page correctly then it’s Microsoft that needs to clean up its act. We shouldn’t be patching their errors for them free of charge.

So just say No. Enough is enough.