Recently I was working on a fairly large web project and we were dealing with some data grids that were very difficult to deal with. I browsed through the site’s analytics to see that IE7 usage had dropped below 5%, and after some discussions with some stakeholders, that was low enough to drop support for it.

Woot!

This allowed us to use CSS tables, which really helped us handle the data which needed to be displayed.

I’m really pleasantly surprised at how quickly IE7 usage has dropped off on some sites. Sadly, I still have to deal with IE8 shortcomings but they’re not as bad. I’m still disappointed in IE9 and sadly Microsoft is still failing to compete with other browsers with at least the IE10 preview. Hopefully they step up their game for the release version.

For your own sites, make sure you check our own data. Sometimes there are strong needs to still support IE7, and even IE6. But at least for some sites, the old versions of IE are going away faster than they used to.