I think a concious decision has to be made at some point to stop the support for IE6. Yes some users are still using it for whatever reason, but it’s a bad bad browser. They managed to phase out the sale of leaded petrol, so lets phase out the support for IE6. Don’t make your website work in the browser, force the site to a “your browser needs updating” page.

When IE7 first came out it was perceived to have broken the web in a lot of cases due to it’s rendering difference from IE6.

Microsoft have obviously taken the decision that this can’t happen again and by providing this meta tag hopefully the take up of IE8 will be a little quicker.

IE7 was also obviously slowed down somewhat by Microsoft checking that it was being installed on a valid Windows system so hopefully they’ve got things in place this time to ensure it gets rolled out much quicker and to a wider audience using Window update (which I believe they did with IE7 to some extent?)

I do share your concerns though and it’ll probably be adopted quite slowly compared to Firefox, Opera and Safari users so sadly we’ll still have to consider IE6 for the next year or so and IE7 for a little longer than that.

Now most of the IE6 users, I grant you, are most likely stuck under the draconian thumb or large corporates that refuse to upgrade the default XP browser with the times, but I ask you – even those that have made the leap to IE7, do you really think IE8 is going to get anywhere close to a significant percentage of users within the first year (2 years?) of its release? If not, then that fancy new piece of meta-data will be lost in the ether – in this sense, IE8′s worst enemy is not Firefox or Opera or even Safari – but rather it’s ancestors! Unless the IE team pull a clever (nasty?) trick like the Safari boys did (in including the brower as part of a “Recommended Important” update along with iTunes), by including it with windows update – then it’s not going to get much mileage – and even then the corprates will still punish themselves by using IE6 until they all upgrade to Vista (which isn’t going very well we’ve seen).

I’m a designer/developer like you (and most others that read your blog) – and of course I’ll be upgrading to FF3 and IE8 as soon as they launch, but only because I can’t bare to see webistes rendered incorrectly (FF2 does it nicely though), but that doesn’t mean that the average Joe out there is going to upgrade – Where is their value add?! There is none really – as long as they can view “most” websites they need to without issues, they’re never going to upgrade on their own. This means only one thing – we’re doomed to support IE6and7 or years to come, and fancy new meta tags “ain’t gonna change that”. I wish it could be as simple as adding that tag though – wouldn’t it be nice to just leave all that non-compliance behind!

I’ll also be interested to see how IE8 deals with height vs min-height without the meta tag as I can see that causing quite a few problems for non-standards developers who will suddenly see a lot of their content overlapping.

It’ll be great once we start to see IE6 phasing out and finally move another step closer to a standardised web.