Yahoo announced today that they are going to be reducing support for IE6 in YUI.  They won’t drop support altogether, but they will be reducing it.  This is not good news.

Don’t get me wrong – I hate IE6. I hate it with the depths of my soul.  I loathe it.

That said, I also recognize that I am stuck with it.  My company is a SaaS provider for the enterprise market.  While IE6 usage has dropped, it is still going strong in the corporate market with over 50% of our traffic.  IE6 is not going anywhere any time soon.

Large corporations have much slower roll out times than consumers.  They have a limited IT staff to support a large user base, and many Microsoft websites like older versions of sharepoint do not work in Windows 7 / IE8.  They are starting to test the waters with upgrading some users to Windows 7, but Windows XP with its IE6 default will still be around for years to come.

With YUI starting to limit support for IE6, it makes the YUI toolset a much less attractive option for our development, since we cannot depend on newer versions to work with a large chunk of our user base.

Do other corporations feel the same way?  Will usage of YUI in the enterprise market start to drop?  I’m curious to see what happens.