Andre Yoskowitz
21 Apr 2013 10:17
Twitter has announced that it will killing off support for the Internet Explorer 6 and 7 browsers in its Twitter for Websites service.
While the current (basic) functionality will still work, Twitter will no longer care about the browsers. If features break IE6 or 7 in the future, so be it.
Twitter for Websites lets devs and content publishers embed Tweets into apps, websites and more. The company says by dumping old browser support, they can execute "simpler, faster, smaller code."
These are the features that will be killed after May 13th:
The Tweet button, Follow button, embedded Tweets and timelines will cease to be initialized in IE6. The script will detect the unsupported browser and silently exit, but the content from the embed codes will remain in place.
Factory functions for the creation of widgets will be defined, but will return false to any callback provided in IE6. Widgets will still be rendered in IE7, but the browser will have limited support and future features may not be implemented.
Web Intents Events, the framework allowing developers to respond to user interactions with the widgets, will no longer be supported in IE6 and IE7.
Twitter emphasized both browsers required heavy shims to pass messages, meaning removing that code will make the library smaller and the events implementation "more reliable." The good news is that Twitter says "this will not be an ugly break."