Along with the announcement/release of IE7 beta, we at web.burza silently dropped support for IE5.01 for Windows. That decision came after we did quite a few high-profile general audience web sites completely with web standards, and after we found that there’s really, really low number of visitors viewing pages with that browser. We tend to believe that the most of the IE5 visitors on those web sites are ourselves, looking for unpredicted bugs.

Dropping support doesn’t mean that a web site will not function, it just means that we don’t care if some icon is not positioned exactly where it should be or if columns are not perfectly tight. Visitor who has a nerve to use such an old piece of software, probably don’t mind about a few glitches here and there. Now, anybody who would argue about how some people can’t install any better browser, I really don’t buy it, but that’s another story…

It isn’t that it’s time consuming in a way of extra hacking to achieve the same layout as in other browsers (we are still supporting IE5.5), but we found that we cannot gain a number of essential and common structural functionality and details in a reasonable time-frame and without compromising what interface designers came up with. We no longer want to restrict ourselves, just because visual composition will appear lousy in IE5.

So, I guess that means I will not think about workarounds for that browser like I used to, and this is also a kind of apology to all of you faithful readers who are seeking for help. If I know how to fix a problem, I would help you, but I no longer have time to be inventive on your particular layouts. Other problems are welcome, though.