I hardly ever use ie at all hate it use Firefox all the time or OPERA both way better then ie5,6or7 I have read ie7 is getting to be the essence of the problems with XP.
but this could be just for putting people off using Firefox or opera.
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Experience

We just stopped supporting IE5.

General concensus in the market is 2 major version coverage for each mainstream browser.

Yeah, it’s a pain to make everything multi/backwards-browser compat… These are one of the lines that draws out the rookies from the professionals.

Start considering IE6 out of date when IE8 is out.

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Remember, when developing… your preference doesn’t mean a damn thing… it’s getting the message/marketing/branding that the website is intended for out to the masses… regardless of browser.
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Within the last year, Microsoft started blocking updates for IE6 running under WINe (a windows emulation software for Linux). More and more, IE is becoming just a browser for the latest Service Pack offered by Microsoft. That’s very limited. I would opinion that dropping IE6 support closes off a large base of web surfers.
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