Several popular websites such as YouTube and Digg will soon drop support for Internet Explorer 6. The is a strong move to prompt more people to upgrade to a modern standards-compliant browser.

Hopefully, more sites will join YouTube (third most popular website on the internet) and Digg (48th most popular in the US) to reduce the overall market share at a faster rate of the decrepit browser. Currently IE6 is still being used by 12% of people in the US.

Why are we (and many other developers) concerned with how many people use IE6? It is totally aggravating to have to write all kinds of extra code to ensure that websites that we build will work well in IE6. It is similar to having your keyboard broken on your computer. When you press the “a” button on your keyboard you would expect an “a” to show up on your screen. But if a “q” showed up it would be very frustrating.

As I mentioned in a previous post, it is our company policy that new sites we build will be supported on the current and the previous version of all of the major browsers (IE, FireFox, Opera, Safari and Chrome) which covers over 99% of all internet users. Some of you may ask “Why are you still supporting IE6 since it is 2 versions old?” The answer is we will still support it for now because IE6 still has quite a bit of market share, but it’s days are numbered. We’ll be sure to let you know when we stop writing extra code to ensure that new sites we build will work with IE6.

Sources:
TechCrunch – YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye
Browser market share