It Was A Beautiful Day

We've had about a hundred (well actually three) really good ideas for blog posts in the last few days but we've shelved them in order to celebrate the slow and not unwelcome death throes of an old and tired adversary.

Take a look at the top of our blog page, right up under the logo and such. See where it says about tying Internet Explorer 6 (aka IE6) to a chair and cutting its ear off? We meant every word. IE6 has been the bane of every web designers life for far too long. Box model hacks, star hacks, margin errors and such have driven us to quite literally mad. But no more! The promised land is in sight!

A quick blaze around our own and the various Google Analytics accounts of our clients have confirmed what we came across earlier today on the W3 Schools website. Usage of IE6 is in steep decline. This is a great thing for the internet as a whole. No more will we be forced to stuff the unstuffable into stuffy holes just so it renders properly in that awful retard of a web browser. W3 Schools have the following stats over the past year:

2009	IE7	IE6	IE8	Firefox
January	25.7%	18.5%	0.6%	45.5%
2008	IE7	IE6	IE5	Firefox
December	26.1%	19.6%		44.4%
November	26.6%	20.0%		44.2%
October	26.9%	20.2%		44.0%
September	26.3%	22.3%		42.6%
August	26.0%	24.5%		43.7%
July	26.4%	25.3%		42.6%
June	27.0%	26.5%	0.5%	41.0%
May	26.5%	27.3%	0.7%	39.8%
April	24.9%	28.9%	1.0%	39.1%
March	23.3%	29.5%	1.1%	37.0%
February	22.7%	30.7%	1.3%	36.5%
January	21.2%	32.0%	1.5%	36.4%

Honestly, that's a joy to behold. Our own research suggests that of the IE use on our sites IE7 is sitting pretty at about 75%, IE6 at about 20% with IE8 making up the rest. Firefox (at a stunning 45.5%!) might not be perfect either but it's worlds better than IE6. Ding dong folks, the witch is (almost) dead. Hug a web designer, they'll be up for it.