The browser shift beyond the IE Dark Age

It was a long time since I last checked the browser and OS statistics for the visitors of this blog. This is how it looks for the last 5000 visits, notice the long-tail:

That long-tail of diverse system and browser combinations wasn’t there just four years ago. An easy conclusion is that nowadays standards are more important than ever. The web isn’t made just for two browsers anymore. So it was/it is important for Microsoft to notice that keeping the IE6 web alive actually was breaking the web for many other devices that cannot cope with support for several rendering engines and modes. It was IE6’s fault —and the coding havoc it brought to the web— that developing browsers for handhelds became stagnant for quite a while after they were capable enough of managing gracefully-degraded pages. And it was IE6’s fault that designing for the web was slower and needlessly time consuming. The farewell to that old browser and the final compliance with standard rendering of IE7+ is marking now the end of this Little Dark Age of the net. Once everybody is standard compliant, it will be easier to advance to newer and more powerful specifications like the promising HTML 5.