Posted by: Nick
While I'm not one to make flippant, short-form blog posts, there are times when I'm so absolutely thrilled with a sea change in our industry that I cannot help but only comment on it due to overwhelming glee.
As both an independent consultant and an agency suit, I will not have to support IE7 anymore. That's right, folks, Internet Explorer 7 is dead to me.
IE 7 currently eats up around 2.5% of the browser market with IE 6 (the step-child of the family) covering approximately 0.9% of the market. In total, that's 3.4% of the market that's using browsers that are so outdated and bereft of any support for modern web technologies, that they may as well be functionally useless at this point in time. And while I'm not necessarily thrilled at the prospect of having to drop 3.4% of the market, that 3.4% represented countless hours of support, workarounds, and a level of hack-fu nonsense that made supporting them impossible to sustain and costly from a development and post-launch support perspective.
In the end that means far fewer headaches during the development cycle, quicker turnarounds on projects, and lower costs for me and my clients. If some of the biggest websites (Facebook, Gmail) and some of the biggest development platforms (Drupal) refuse to support that beast, then I'm more than happy to follow suit to retain my sanity.
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