Dreamten Studios

CSS 3.0 introduces a slew of new exciting techniques for designers to utilize including new attribute selectors, border radius, text shadow, font-face, and more. Many of the common challenges faced by designers are being rectified by the latest CSS 3.0 standard and designers adopting the new standard will have a bevy of new tools in their design toolkit.

While these are great things to look forward to, the reality is that most of CSS 3.0's features are not supported by the antiquated, yet still widely adopted, 8 year old web browser, Internet Explorer 6. Standards based web browsers (such as Firefox and Safari) are quickly gaining momentum, but they are not yet ubiquitous, and according to w3schools browser statistics data, IE6's market share is still at a significant 14.5 percent. While this number is declining monthly, there are a ton of people browsing the web that have no desire or reason for change.

Several companies (such as 37 Signals, Xero, and even Facebook) have resorted to exclusion of visitors using IE6, forcing users to either upgrade their browsers, or go elsewhere. Entire campaigns have been started in attempts to eradicate IE6 usage due to its quirks that cause web pages to render differently than in other browsers. I agree with this sentiment - IE 6 is a last generation web browser that needs to be phased out. On average, I have to devote roughly 15% more time to my CSS layouts to ensure they work in IE 6. Discontinuing support for IE 6 would make my life so much easier, but how do you tell a client that their website won't be accessible by ~15% of the market? In my opinion, you can't. For now, IE 6 is the lowest common denominator that I have to account for.  Until this changes, CSS 3.0 won't matter much to me.