Future of activeCollab and IE6 Support

Soon people will stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 no matter what you may feel about this at the moment, just like they did with Netscape 4 a couple of years ago. Some companies have already stopped checking their pages in IE6 (like Apple with MobileMe, or 37signals) and some are still keeping their pages compatible, but recommending users to upgrade or to chose a better browser (Google, Facebook).

All that is for a good reason - IE6 has been with us since 2001, Microsoft has released two major updates since then (IE7 and IE8); it’s insecure, unstable and a real pain to develop for (incomplete CSS support, many compatibility problems, poor JavaScript performance, etc):

Because of all of these reasons, IE6 support is going away from activeCollab as well. The only questions are “When?” and “How?”

“When?” - As soon as we get to the next version of the activeCollab’s layout and its default theme. The system grew quite a bit since it was launched back in October 2007. Two years is a long time for a young product like activeCollab, so we’ll need to improve the application layout to better support all the features that were added since v1.0, as well as all the features that will be added in the next couple of years.

This does not mean that support is going away tomorrow -  as long as activeCollab 2 is the latest stable version, full IE6 support will be present. Version 3 and later will require a modern browser. We still have 6 - 12 months until then, but that day will come and we feel that it’s best to announce our plans upfront.

“How?” - One of our most important jobs is to make sure that activeCollab make you look good and professional. Completely dropping support for IE6 would make our users look bad to their customers who are forced to use IE6. Because of that, we'll work to make system usable in Internet Explorer 6, but some of the features that require modern browser will be disabled.

To summarize - sometime during 2010 we will stop to fully support Internet Explorer 6 in activeCollab and we will limit the support to basic features only.

Illustration by John Martz.