Breaking up is hard to do
Last month the internet quietly observed the 9th birthday of Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6). It's strange how something can turn 9 years old yet be no smarter than the day it was born... but that's another story. IE6 was a groundbreaking release in its day, but today we find it slow and incompatible with web standards. It makes all of our development more slow and complex as we fine-tune our code and our design to work on this ancient browser.
IE6 can't show modern web pages the way their designers intended. It's also incredibly inefficient with JavaScript, the scripting language that makes modern web pages more interactive. Since version 6, Microsoft has shipped three more major versions of IE. And yet millions of users are stuck on the older version.
Why? Two big reasons: it was installed by default with Windows XP, Microsoft's most successful operating system ever; and some enterprises wrote custom applications that were tuned to the quirky features in IE6 and they still rely on those apps. For years, many companies have been trying to migrate away from IE6 and their efforts are bearing fruit.
We see a steady decline in our customers' use of IE6 in the past 10 months. Today about 5% of our sessions are on IE6.
And so after much debate we've decided to end our support for IE6 effective January 1, 2011. That doesn't mean that IE6 users will be unable to access ClickTime on the morning of January 2nd. It just means that all of our new work will no longer be tested on IE6.
If you expect that this transition will present a problem for you or your organization, please contact us and let us know. Otherwise, we'll all look forward to this transition.
