Microsoft released the final version of Internet Explorer 8 this afternoon. Some of you may start thinking “Hey! Great! Now we can drop support for IE6!” Well, I’ve got news for you: you can’t.

Well, not if you’re developing professionally, anyway.

Sure, there’s the occasional luddite out there who’s just afraid of upgrading their computers (hi mom!), but that alone can’t account for the ~20% of users still using IE6¹. You can’t ignore 20% of your user base.

Who makes up that ~20%? Corporate and government users are tied to IE6 by legacy internal webapps that are incompatible with other browsers—even IE7—and who are locked out of upgrading IE or installing a second browser by their enterprise security policy.

There is some hope, a thin, microscopic, atomicly thin sliver of hope. Vista ships with IE7 in it’s baseline distribution². But, unless those enterprises update those webapps, they’ll be stuck on good ‘ol IE6.

So, if you work at one of theses places, please try to make the case to do the updates necessary to get everyone onto at least IE7. It’ll be hard though, MS policy obliges them to support WinXP SP3 (and thusly IE6) with security updates through the year 2014³.

What does this mean for web developers and programmers now that IE8 is out? We have to support 3 versions of Internet Explorer now.

Is it 2014 yet?