With the latest release of OpenFISMA, we are officially announcing an end to support for the Internet Explorer 6 web browser.

We abandoned 'aesthetic' correctness in IE6 some time ago -- meaning that we only ensured that the application was functional in IE6, but not necessarily rendered correctly.

Even with that lower standard, though, troubleshooting IE6 bugs still absorbed hundreds of hours from our development schedule. Those hours could have been spent in more useful areas, such as improving usability or adding new functionality.

Google announced this year that they would be dropping support for IE6 in their enterprise applications, and they are not the only company to announce such a policy.

In light of this, OpenFISMA will not be supporting IE6 in any form moving forward. Most of the federal agencies which we work directly with have already upgraded past IE6, and we anticipate that most of the OpenFISMA user base will have done the same.

We will continue to support later versions of Internet Explorer, primarily IE7. Even though IE7 still fails on many standards compliance issues and still requires extra overhead to debug, most government agencies are using this browser by default -- or even block users from installing better browers.

The following list indicates browsers with A-level support from the OpenFISMA team. The development team uses these browsers actively, tests against these browsers, and will guarantee functionality in these browsers. 

• Internet Explorer 7
• Firefox 3+
• Chrome
• Safari 4+

Any deficiencies using OpenFISMA with these browsers will be considered to be bugs in OpenFISMA and we will go out of our way to correct them or work around them. Deficiencies in other browsers may not be fixed by the team, or may not have high priority.

I still recommend to all users to avoid using IE7, if possible, as OpenFISMA will run noticeably faster when using a browser like Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.