Hiya,

First a little introduction of me: I am no webdesigner and have no aspirations of ever becoming one! I do some experimenting
around with html, css and php just for fun and so I can build my own portfolio website. My own aspirations lie more in the
print-/advertisingcorner.

But while working on my portfolio site I got into an interesting discussion with myself (disturbing I know):

'With Vista on the rise, IE7 slowly taking over the world and FireFox still no the rise.. Is it still necessary to make
a website compatible with pre IE7 browsers? I was thinking that most of the general population will be using either
FF or Vista sooner than later..'

Now I know that the big majority isn't using iether FireFox or Internet Explorer 7 yet, but I do really think that it
won't be long until 75+% of them will be switching towards Vista (and thus IE7)! And because FF and IE7 are now a
lot closer together than ever before, it could safe a lot of time, efford and code by skipping older IE versions!

Am I completely off the boat? Any ideas on the topic? Heck, maybe you've found some hidden alternative?

Prologue,

Consider the people who will be using the website you build. If you think 99% of them will be running IE7, FF or Safari, then there's really no need for you support older browsers.

I agree with Varland though; in most cases, it will be at least a couple of years before we can stop supporting IE6. Some sites still need to support version 5 *shudders*.

Adjustafresh, yeah I already got wondering about target audiences, which is probably the main reason why websites do support older browsers. But I kind of figured Vista would motivate a large part of the internet users to upgrade, since it seems to offer a lot of improvements. The fact that a large group of users never bought a legal version of Windows seems to have slipped my mind there for a minute or two.

Varland, I hate how you put it not as 25% but as "one-in-four", that makes it sounds so much more! But I do agree with you, loosing 25% (or one-in-four, if you like the dramatic version) might not be a good marketing idea!

Matt, I think you're quite right about the number of upgrades, IE7 seems to offer a lot of neat, user-friendly features older IE's seem to lack, which may be a huge motivation for upgrading. But again the whole illegal-windows-thingy makes it a lot more difficult!

It seems Microsoft finally got back at the cracked-Windows-users.. By finally offering some real benefits to using the legal stuff, quite ironic actually, the guys who thought they were better off by downloading for free are now IE7-less and missing out on some nice improvements (ofcourse they could always download FireFox for kind of the same package ;))

Apparantly this is/was a shorter discussion than I had imagined, there seem to be a lot of reasons to still support IE6 and earlier and no reason (except for laziness) to focus on IE7 and FF. Just for the sake of argument I was wondering if there are some other viable reasons for not supporting IE6 (and earlier)? Does IE7 offer some options that don't work in earlier versions or that mess up earlier versions?