Facebook to Drop Internet Explorer 7 Support

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Facebook is keeping abreast of advancements in web standards. As such, the social network is dropping support for old and obsolete web browsers, as it starts supporting newer standards for displaying web content.

Facebook officially dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 late in 2010, and the company is about to cease support for users running Microsoft’s aging Internet Explorer 7 browser. While Facebook still runs on IE7, one of its newest and most important features will not. In particular, Timeline does not appear on IE7, and users who still run the five-year-old browser will see an old Facebook profile design, littered with styling issues, which might make the page unwieldy to use.

Facebook could have included partial support for IE7, which handles CSS differently from newer browser versions. However, the social network has apparently opted against this, and instead focused on designing for newer standards. As such, it’s likely that Facebook will be officially phasing out IE7 support altogether sooner or later.

IE7′s global market share is falling, currently at just 4% (in comparison, its predecessor, IE6 has a 1.8% market share). Other major web service companies have also dropped support for Microsoft’s ailing browser, with Google announcing that popular services Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar will no longer work properly with IE7. Developers and interface designers are likely not interested in exerting efforts to cater to an old browser with outdated (and slow) rendering technology, especially given its dwindling market share.

As a side-effect, users who, for some reason want to view old versions of a Facebook profile — which essentially turns off Timeline — can use IE7, or set their browser-agent to Internet Explorer 7, as noted by the Sociable.