The time has come. The time is now. Internet Explorer 6, will you please go now?!

Much like Dr. Suess’s beloved Marvin K. Mooney, it is getting to be about time that IE6 went. It will be a solemn passing of once a mega-browser whose life has spanned much longer than we could ever imagine.

It seems like just yesterday that IE6 came packaged with Windows XP. It was a savior. It was newer, faster and prettier. Who didn’t love that default “Luna” theme that came with a shiny new install of XP? It wasn’t just good looks and that little extra zip that made IE6 great. At the time DHTML enhancements, content restricted inline frames, a fancy media bar, Windows Messenger integration and automatic image resizing made IE6 the darling of web. Well, until 2003 that is.

It was about that same time that those pesky little flies over at Mozilla unleashed upon us all, Firefox. It was then that Internet Explorer got a good look at something that it hadn’t seen in quite awhile: competition. Before Firefox, IE6 was enjoying being the browser used by over 90% of internet users. Things were so sweet in the youthful days … so sweet.

From there, our friend, IE6, really began to show its age. Pretty soon people all over the interweb, particularly geeks and web developers, started to want things that Internet Explorer 6 just wouldn’t give. We wanted PNG transparency support, but couldn’t have this great design tool on our new site if we expected people to see it in IE6. IE6 has had trouble adjusting to new programming languages and practices. It likes to double the margin on floating DIVs — fixable, sure, but plain annoying all the same. Problems like this one require a plethora of browser-specific programming fixes that waste time, as well as compromise simple and intuitive programming. Plus, who isn’t sick of the lack of support for minimum height in CSS? IE6 isn’t sick of it, that’s who!

Sure, some of us in corporate America are going to find letting go of this fancy little piece of software difficult to do, but trust us, it really is for the best. Your old friend isn’t nearly as secure as its peers. In fact, it is the most vulnerable of all major browsers. It is slower, less feature-rich and is hindering you from seeing the web as it is intended to be seen. Sure, some companies are moving on SLOWLY, but at the end of the day, the upgrade is free and it makes the office place more secure. We are strong enough to live through this. Internet users, we … we will move on.

It has been a long run, but the writing is on the wall. With major web destinations like Digg, Facebook and YouTube all saying goodbye to IE6, we should be prepared for the death rattle. Soon it will be email providers and news sites, and more and more development companies will begin to charge their clients for programmatic support.
The end is near.

We bid you ado, sweet Internet Explorer 6. But with IE8, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera waiting for us in the wings, we won’t mourn for too long.

The time had come. So, IE6 went.