Half a month ago, I wrote about our company gradually removing support for Internet Explorer 6. Well, this month we’re starting to do so. And support for IE6 is going to be accounted as an extra service.

As we try to evolve ourselves in designing websites, which often means we use many things that is not probably compatible in IE6 (such as transparent PNGs for a start), we thought that we need to do something about it. We could only hope that IE6 dies on its own soon, as the awareness is gaining. And with the fact that more people are upgrading to IE7, I think at least that’s a start, although IE7 is not our favorite browser. Compared to Firefox, Camino, Safari, or even Opera, for that matter, it doesn’t come without its own bugs.

IE6 was introduced in 2001, so it has been around for 7 years now. It was not a browser that came from natural selection. It was a browser that evolved from the market share of IE4, a savior to the internet world at its time (This was the time when Netscape goes awol and left common users with nothing but IE4 or Internet Explorer for the Mac). Over the years, it has given us lots of unnecessary hacks so that a single page would display properly there, eventhough it was semantically-coded, and validated as a valid XHTML 1.0 Strict document. Over the years, this is no longer feasible to us. When we review the things we did for IE6, we’re just helping something staying alive, but the fact is, that thing is going to die any. At the same time, we were also cocooned in the state of that limited creativity, in fear that a design might break up significantly on IE6.

Internet users, lazy corporate IT managers and staff, and ignorant Windows users (Because Mac users are saved by Safari)… Please upgrade. It’s time to move on. It’s not like you have to pay for a simple upgrade anyway. All the good browsers are free and definitely less frustrating than IE6.

More information and articles I’ve found:
SaveTheDevelopers.org
Browse Happy
Stupid IE
6 Reasons Why IE6 Must Die
37Signal: Phasing Out Support for IE6

To celebrate our nation’s Independence Day, our office will be closed on Monday, August 18, 2008. We will be back open the next day.

To respect the upcoming Isra Mi’raj national holiday, our office will be closed on Wednesday, July 30, 2008, and we will be back open the next day.

To our respected clients,

Along with this letter, we regretfully announce that we will have possible scheduled power outages on Friday, July 11 2008 toward Friday, July 25, 2008 due to our nationwide energy crisis. The currently published schedule from our power company indicates that we will have a definitive power outage on the July 11^th, 14^th, 15^th, and 16^th, with the remaining dates to be confirmed.

Please kindly note that this will be a force majeure event beyond the scope of our control, but we are working hard to provide optimal services for our clients. We are currently in the process of installing backup generators to provide power and communication, and hopefully our internet connection will not be affected by the outages, since it relies on the city’s cable network to operate. We also hope that the generator installation will be completed before those dates.

To our US-based clients, please note that the power outages are going to be done mainly during our working hours, therefore, our time zone differences may affect our proposed timeline and schedules. We apologize for this inconvenience.

To our web-hosting clients, please note that this power failure does not affect any of our web-hosting services, since our servers are located in the United States.

We will be on standby and continue working normally supposedly we do not get the outages on those confirmed dates.

Thank you for your understanding.

Our office will be closed on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 for the Vesak national holiday. We will be back open the next day.