R.I.P. IE6, You Won't Be Missed

Posted by Derek Pine on Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 9:40 AM  |  More From This Author »

Denver web design company, Aten Design Group, will hold a tongue-in-cheek funeral for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) on March 4 to signify the over-the-hill browser's deterioration. Aten announced IE6's funeral on Monday with a site, ie6funeral.com, which offered a short obituary and an invitation to a wake.

"Internet Explorer 6, resident of the interwebs for over eight years, died the morning of March 1, 2010, in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc." The obit continues, "Internet Explorer 6, known to friends and family as 'IE6,' is survived by son Internet Explorer 7, and grand-daughter Internet Explorer 8."
- From ie6funeral.com

The Google reference comes from the company's announcement to drop support of the horribly aged, no-good browser IE6. Other online services are also jumping in and dropping their support, including YouTube on March 13.

For us web designers, this is reason to crack out the champagne and caviar and have a party to celebrate. If you're not a web designer, this may mean absolutely nothing to you and you will therefore have no idea what the big deal is. So allow me to clarify... IE6 is a web designer's NIGHTMARE! The amount of hacks and work-arounds you need to do to get a site to look correct in IE6 can be downright obnoxious at times.

The way I tend to work when designing a website is by occasionally previewing it on my native Firefox and Safari browser. But then I get to that point... that scary, dreaded point... where I walk to the Windows laptop and launch IE6. And low and behold, while everything looked great in Firefox, Safari, IE7 and 8... in IE6 it looks like I just put the computer in a blender and tried to make a smoothie. GGGRRRRR!!!!

So thank you Aten for helping to make it official!

R.I.P. IE6