Andy Miller at RocketTheme has taken a bold, but important stance to cut off support of IE6 by Jan 1st, 2010.

Microsoft's IE6 was released pre-Windows XP on August 27, 2001 and at the time it was a pretty fast and for its time a modern browser sporting partial support for CSS level 1, DOM level 1 and SMIL 2.0.

Since then; time has not been kind to this once domineering browser and in fact it has been replaced twice by IE7 and the recently released IE8 and let's face it, the browser is almost eight years old - the dwindling percentage of users should upgrade or change to a different browser base such as Firefox or Chrome.

Security Risk

Ie6 has has a long history of being a security risk, coupled with extremely long release cycles and the lack of security patches which is only multiplied over time as the updates get fewer and the number of security exploits increases, including critical ones that are left un-patched.

The security risks involved in using this browser should be enough for any user to upgrade to a more modern browser.

Web Site design issues

Supporting Internet Explorer 6 has been a pain in the proverbial butt to all web developers, requiring hours if not days of 'hacking' designs to get it working reliably on IE6.

While a design would work flawlessly in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc., IE6 would not look right at all due to quirks, bugs and just plain erroneous handling of common XHTML and CSS elements.

Many times as well, developing for the least common denominator would force designers to drop design elements or layouts entirely just to ensure that IE6 users would not be left with a big mess on their displays.

It has been said that IE6 by itself is holding back the web as the latest versions of Chrome, Safari 4, Firefox 3.5 and Opera 10 support innovative features that allow web applications that rivals their desktop counterparts.

This has made many businesses, organizations, and even entire countries take a stand to stop supporting ie6 on their sites and applications.

Now, RocketTheme and many other Joomla designers join their ranks; JoomlaPraise has also announced their support of the IE6 End of Life movement.

IE6 End of Life January 1, 2010

According to w3schools.com, IE6 has gone from a high in November 2003 of 71.2% of all Internet traffic recorded, IE6 usage had dropped to 32% in January 2008, and 18.5% in January 2009. 

By 2010, this percentage is estimated to have dropped to around 6-8% and with the introduction of Windows 7 this fall, this percentage could drop even lower.

An eight year old software product is positively ancient in technology terms, and the upgrade path to IE8, Firefox, Chrome etc is easy and free.  The hold outs are almost entirely corporations who have legacy applications that require IE6's broken rendering engine, but now is the time for those businesses to upgrade their core applications or get left behind.

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Andy Miller founded and runs one of Joomla's largest template clubs RocketTheme and is well regarded in the Joomla community.