AOPA Online: new features won't work on Internet Explorer 6 and earlier

AOPA Online will no longer support versions 6 and earlier of Internet Explorer for new enhancements to aopa.org.

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6 in August 2001, over 8 years ago. Take a look at AOPA's website from back then! Since IE6's debut, many new technologies have emerged, allowing us to build powerful online tools like the AOPA Internet Flight Planner (AIFP) and enhanced Weather, with much more to come. When we launched AIFP in late 2008, IE6 was still being used by about 25% of aopa.org visitors. This required us to make compromises in the application specific to IE6's limitations. Unfortunately, the effort spent making AIFP upgrades work on older browsers has dramatically slowed continuing development of the application.

As of September 2009, IE6 usage on aopa.org has declined by more than half, to about 11% of our visitors. As members upgrade their browsers, operating systems, and hardware, we expect this decline to accelerate. Beginning October 1st, we will no longer include backwards compatibility in our website enhancements.

Everything currently on the AOPA.org web site will continue to work in IE6, but new enhancements to our site may not function properly without a modern browser. For instance, with our new Weather application, IE6 visitors are sent back to the old interface. To the greatest degree possible, we will continue the practice of keeping old versions of our online tools available. However, our focus going forward will be on developing new tools that leverage the expanding capabilities of the current and future generations of browsers.

There is at least one alternative web browser available for everyone still running IE6. If you are interested in learning how to upgrade your browser so you can get the most value out of aopa.org, we recommend trying any of the following modern, supported browsers that you can download for free:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8	Mozilla Firefox	Google Chrome	Apple Safari	Opera
Windows XP Imports IE6 settings automatically	Windows 2000, XP Importing IE6 settings	Windows XP Importing IE6 settings	Windows XP Imports IE6 settings automatically	Windows 95 and later Importing IE6 settings

If you are using Internet Explorer 6 at work, we recommend requesting an upgrade from your company's IT department. It may also be possible for you to run the portable edition of Firefox.