The grumblings of my fellow web designers and developers about having to support Internet Explorer 6 is not a new topic; some, including myself, would say that it’s been discussed to death. It’s not going away anytime soon, so we should just shut up and deal with it. Right?

Well, now that Internet Explorer 8 is officially out of beta, IE 6 is three versions old. If there were ever a time, as a web developer, to come to a conclusion about how to handle the IE 6 problem, it’s now.

For a while I subscribed to the “two versions old” rule: I would continue to support the last two versions of Internet Explorer. For a long time, that meant 6 and 7. Oh, the many nights I spent waiting for 8 to come out! Finally, I could stop pandering to IE6! No more (well, not as many) silly hacks! Decent CSS support! The list goes on!

But it turns out that it’s not so simple. While discussing the IE 6 problem with a co-worker the other day, he remarked that IE8 isn’t actually going to displace IE6 at all. See, since almost all IE6 users are using a version of Windows (most likely 2000) that can’t support IE 7 or 8, it’s not as if IE 6 will disappear and only IE 7 and 8 will remain. Instead, IE6 users will keep using IE6 – since their computers can’t support the newer versions – and IE 7 users will use IE 8. So, IE 8 will replace IE 7, but IE 7 won’t replace IE 6. In other words, we’ll have one standards-compliant browser and one horrible piece of you-know-what. This situation, in effect, cancels out the ‘two versions old’ rule since, of the three most recent versions of IE,

We, as professional web developers and designers, can’t ignore IE 6 – not yet. After looking at the Google Analytics stats for top ten most popular websites that the company I work for has done, the user base for IE 6 seems to be anywhere from 10% – 18% (based on a wide variety of sites, from real estate to brewpubs to motivational speakers). So, on average, 15% of web surfers are still using IE 6. That number has (thankfully!) been shrinking for a while now, but I would argue that it’s just not low enough to cut off support. IE 6 is dying a slow, painful death, and until the numbers shrink some more – I would say 10% of users is a good threshold at which to stop with the hacks – offering support for the browser is just a matter of being a professional and solving as many problems as possible.