Limited support for Internet Explorer 6

The DevExpress ASP.NET products will have very limited support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in the next major release. That’s both the good and bad news.

We ultimately plan to end support for IE6 going forward with new releases because of several major reasons.

Why stop supporting IE6?

Two years ago, I asked if we should drop IE6 support. The majority of our customers responded positively that we should. And now in 2013, it’s come to the point where we can no longer hesitate but make a decision. We are going to limit IE6 support. The main reasons?

1. IE6 is a very old browser (2001). It does not support the newer technologies that the DevExpress ASP.NET team would like to use for our controls in order to make them even better. Currently, HTML5 and CSS3 are standards for all modern browsers and web applications, however IE6 does not support them. DevExpress ASP.NET server controls support HTML5 and take advantage of CSS3 in our controls.

2. Our newer DevExpress ASP.NET controls have stopped supporting IE6 because we’ve moved to using CSS3. New controls like the ASPxDocking, ASPxImageSlider, ASPxImageGallery, and ASPxFormLayout will not work in IE6. New features like EndlessPaging in ASPxGridView (and ASPxDataView) will not work in IE6. Our new ASP.NET themes (iOS, Metropolis, etc.) do not support IE6.

This does not mean that you cannot use these controls in your apps if your users use IE6; for example, there are customers who use the ASPxFormLayout without issues in that browser. However, we cannot (and do not) guarantee that the control appearance and behavior will be correct in IE6.

3. Supporting IE6 can introduce new bugs. The DevExpress ASP.NET development team is constantly improving our ASP.NET controls for performance and appearance by taking advantage of new technologies such as CSS3. These code modifications can result in new bugs when used with IE6.

Of course the DevExpress ASP.NET team is ready to research and fix them. However, they will not be fixed for IE6 if the team has to seriously modify the control.

4. DevExpress ASP.NET demos are broken in IE6 because our demo pages render HTML5. To test whether a control works in IE6, I recommend you create a test project, add a Transition or Strict DOCTYPE tag to the page, and then add and test the required components at runtime.

5. Microsoft will stop supporting IE6 when it stops support for Windows XP in April 2014. At that point, the basic security of the browser will start to deteriorate and users should migrate to a later version.

IE6 limited support

We understand that some end-users are still using IE6 (especially in Intranet applications) and we want to make your transition from IE6 as smooth as possible. If however you encounter an issue with our products using IE6 then please feel free to contact our support team. We will research the issue and try to fix it under the limitations I've already described. This applies to our ASP.NET controls that support the older browser like the DXperience v2013.1, v2012.x, etc.

Goodbye ‘Classic’, Hello ‘Lightweight’

Starting with DXperience v2013.2, we will only support IE7 or later. In fact, we shall be dropping the RenderMode known as ‘Classic’:

Back in 2010, we introduced the “Lightweight” and “Classic” render modes. You can learn more about it here:

- ASP.NET Menu, NavBar And Pager Performance Improvements – v2010 vol 1
- ASP.NET Popup Control – Lightweight Render, Scroll Bars, CSS3, MVC and more (available now in v2011.1)

Since the ‘Classic’ render mode is for IE6, we will no longer need it. Instead we shall use the “Lightweight” mode by default. Yay!

Less than 1% in the West

IE6 usage worldwide has dropped to 6.1%, according to www.IE6countdown.com:

Breaking it down further, it’s less than 1% for the Americas and Europe, with the rest of the world pretty much at much less than 5%. China is the sole holdout, it seems, where 1 in 5 people are still using IE6.

Supported Browsers

DevExpress ASP.NET AJAX Controls and MVC Extensions are cross-browser compatible and are carefully tested against the following desktop browsers to ensure utmost compatibility: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0+, Mozilla FireFox 2.0+, Google Chrome 1.0+, Apple Safari 3.0+, and Opera 9.0+. We also support mobile browsers for iOS, Android, and Windows 8, including touch.

DevExpress ASP.NET controls are still the best on the market and we will continue to improve them for widest reach possible of browsers. If you have concerns, please let me know: mharry@devexpress.com

Thanks!