Due to an overwhelming positive response, we are officially dropping support for Internet Explorer 7. What does this actually mean?

• We will no longer test or fix minor display issues that only affect IE7.
• We have flagged the browser as out-of-date which will add a notification banner to many of the pages on our site and direct the user to upgrade.

Why drop support?

1. Internet explorer has a long list of layout (css) bugs. While most of them have workarounds, this coding takes time. With Internet Explorer 7 now accounting for less than 3% of our total traffic, it is no longer worth the effort.
2. We are encountering more and more IE7 specific javascript bugs. As with the css issues, coding around these issues isn’t worth the effort.
3. Lack of support for Cross Domain Messaging (XDM). This javascript messaging protocol is now used for minor functionality on our homepage as well as being required for the new YouTube iframe embed API.

When will this occur?

We have already made the change to flag Internet Explorer 7 (as well as Firefox 4, Safari 4 and Chrome 3) as out-of-date. Due to caching it may take up to 30 days for some users to see the banner.