End of the day, you just have to convince clients that the concept of graded support makes the most business sense. IE6 on our sites will definitely work, but might miss out on some design niceties if they’re trivial in new browsers and very difficult in older ones. It doesn’t mean we don’t support it, just that the level of support is different.
Yep. If you've made a promise, you keep it, even if you hate doing so. That's something I'd expect from someone I entered into business with; wouldn't you?
Sure. If you’ve agreed a support schedule upfront then by all means you should honour it. I’m not sure though that I’d be bad-mouthing my own products at the same time. Although actually thinking about it, I can’t see why you wouldn’t :)
Still, supporting from Microsoft’s point of view just means providing security fixes; they’re perfectly within their rights to stop making their new sites work with it (as evidenced by the new online Office that doesn’t work with it).
I find this amusing, because I've said the same phrase about Windows before, as a parody of the Ad Council's famous anti-drunk-driving commercial that they did for the US DOT.
The IE6 version of the phrase, to my ears, sounds like "friends don't let friends keep our impressive browser market-share fragmented into three largely incompatible versions".
"Friends don't let friends use IE6," said Amy Bazdukas, Microsoft's general manager for Internet Explorer (IE).
That's not at odds with their support commitment. Just because they will support IE6 for another half decade doesn't mean they want people to be using IE6.
