Rest in peace, IE6… now what?

Like many web shops of late, my workplace has officially discontinued support for Internet Explorer 6. My initial reaction was: Yay! No more PNG transparency issues! And I can finally use all those poorly supported CSS selectors and properties without resorting to hacks…

But wait, most people are likely to upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. In our case, for example, approximately 11% of page views are from IE7. And while IE7 is a big improvement over its much maligned predecessor, it’s still far from standards compliant. If you, like me, are wondering what’s now free game, read on.

Welcome to 2006

Here are the CSS features that can be freely used in a post IE6 world, assuming you still need to support IE7:

1. Properties

   1. min-height, max-height, min-width, max-width

2. Selectors

   1. multiple classes (eg .frame.clear)

   2. :hover on elements other than <a>

   3. direct child (eg #nav > .item)

   4. sibling (eg .section ~ .item)

   5. attribute selectors (eg p[foo])

   6. 
      

Sadly, not as long as one might hope. And display: inline-block support is still buggy. But it’s progress.

If you want the browser-by-browser details, Quirks Mode has you covered.

The other big factor is performance. Microsoft made a number of optimizations (and fixed memory leaks) with IE7, and it’s reported to be roughly twice as fast as IE6. Unfortunately, in terms of javascript performance, IE7 is still at least 10 times slower than the fastest modern browsers.

If only everyone would upgrade directly to IE9…

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