We’d like to let you know about a change we’re making to our web font serving browser support. Due to low usage, increasingly high maintenance costs, and ongoing concerns about security, we’re planning to retire our support for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 at the end of this year.

These browsers represent a very small percentage of our web font serving traffic, with IE6 at 0.2%, and IE7 at just 0.004%. In addition, HTTPS serving in IE6 has been disabled by our CDN provider EdgeCast, due to the POODLE security vulnerability, which makes it much less secure for serving fonts.

As their user base has dwindled, continued support for these older browsers has become disproportionately more costly in terms of engineering time. Microsoft has already discontinued IE6 support, and announced it will discontinue support for IE7 at the start of 2016. Microsoft recommends updating to newer, more secure browsers. By not supporting these old browsers we can also make our kit JavaScript smaller and run faster in modern browsers.

Once we retire support for IE6 and IE7, anyone using one of those browsers to visit your site will see the fallback fonts you’ve specified in the CSS instead of the fonts from Typekit. No other part of these visitors’ experience will be impacted by this — no page load blocking or JavaScript errors.

Please get in touch with us if you have any concerns about how this will impact your website or your customers. Browser standards are a shifting landscape, and we’d like to make our part of this transition as smooth as possible.