Flickr credit: elisfanclub
As I’ve been working more with CSS3 and HTML5 (and starting to write about it), a common theme I’ve found in CSS books, websites and other material is this:
“… and then you have to do this to make it look right in Internet Explorer 6…”
… and then you do this for IE6… and then you do that… and then you add this kludgey hack… and then you add that kludgey hack… and then you click your heels three times while sacrificing a goat on the eve of a full moon in order to get your 2010 web page to look good in a browser that came out in 2001!
ENOUGH ALREADY!
How much time, energy and other resources are we going to continue to waste?
At what point do we in the communication business just stop caring about IE6 users?
Yes, yes, I know that the “proper” answer is that “it depends” and you need to look at the visitors coming to your website. And yes, I can see from those stats that one of the sites I work with actually has about 7% of its visitors using IE6.
But seriously, folks… are we going to continue to design for the lowest common denominator simply because either organizational inertia or organizational incompetence is keeping people using a ~10-year-old browser???
I mean… upgrading to a newer version of IE is FREE! There aren’t any of the cost issues associated with, say, Office. (And yes, I recognize that some of those companies still using IE6 are probably also still using Office 97!)
Yes, I realize that some internal apps or sites may break… but come on, how long has it been? And think of how many security issues you would address simply by moving away from IE6!
MY VOTE…
I know my vote… I’m in the process of redesigning some sites and I am NOT going to care about IE6 visitors. Now, maybe I have that luxury because the sites involved are around “emerging technology” and if you are interested in that topic it’s pretty certain you are NOT using IE6 (and the stats show that)… but I’m also considering taking that option for some other sites, too.
Enough!
P.S. Hey, Facebook stopped supporting IE6 back in August… can we get other large sites to do that, too?
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It’s so frustrating to devote a fair amount of time to do the design of website/blog and then realize it’s not rendered properly in IE6, forcing you to make gross hacks in your code just for that particular browser! So much time wasted for what? A meager 7%?
I’m with you. No more IE6 hacking.
The effort isn’t worth it anymore. Like DejaNews, IE6 is an ex-parrot!
The browser wars has always been a horrible nightmare. In the past I have spent enormous amounts of time (sometimes as much as 40%) of project time in resolving the various compatibility issues.
As far as IE6 is concerned, I now pass the decision on to the customer. In my proposals I say that my solution will support IE7/8/9, if the customer wants to have IE6 support, I make it clear that they will have to pay extra for the piviledge.
I also stress that Goggle no longer supports IE6 as an argument against trying to support it.
“… and then you have to do this to make it look right in Internet Explorer 6…”
we can all swap that for
“… and then you have to do this to make it look right on an iPhone… “
I’ve stopped caring for IE6 several months ago.
If you don’t have a modern browser, then you are not welcome on my sites. Simple as that.
At least one government organization in Singapore is still using IE6 because their web application requires it and it is too much hassle for them to teach all the staffs to switch to compatibility mode if they upgrade to newer IE.
There are a few websites that I go on (youtube being one) that proclaim “You are using an outdated browser and must update”. I am. I’m using a Windows 98 machine because I dislike XP, don’t think much of Windows 7 (“it WASN’T my idea!”), and you don’t want to get me started on Vista. I Have IE5.5 installed, but never use it – instead I’m stuck with an older version of Firefox, which works fine on probably 99% of websites.
And as far as I know, all these sites that proclaim “you are out of date” work fine – apart from the ones that wilfully refuse to let me proceed – in which case, I will quite happily take my custom elsewhere.
Customising your website for a particular browser has always struck me as really stupid. It’s only a bloody website! It’s probably going to cost you far more than it’s ever going to bring in for your business. Unless you sell expensive over-priced websites of course – you might win, but I bet 99.995% of your clients lose!
I’m totally agree!! On JIT market we cant waste time developing fake-code for suport IExploder 6.
I’ve dropped IE6, it’s such a tiny community that the additional time and extra complexity it causes is simply not worth the hassle.
Spend you time on things like mobile browsing, creating CSS for different sized display, rather than antique browsers, this has a much higher return.
And don’t for get to add to those old browser users:
“Please update you browser for the good of humankind and the sanity of developers everywhere!”
Many of the big corporates still use IE6 because there is a significant cost in upgrading 1000s of machines. Thankfully, this is slowly changing and the Investment Banks that I work for are looking at upgrading to IE8 next year. None are looking at other browsers. Many of my colleagues are on 7 or 8 figure incomes, so their disposable incomes will be possibly thousands of times that of your average user. So if you are selling something that might be of interest to the devillish bankers and you want them to look at your site at work, keep you IE6 hacks in place for now.
Don’t fool yourself:
Public Web site design will forever have to deal with browser incompatibilities.
You will very soon have to deal with html5 and its incompatibilities in various browsers (desktop, pads, phones, etc.).
The hassle you actually have with IE6 will be small compared to what is coming…
If it does not work with Lynx, you lost me. I could not care less about fancy whirly windows popping up all over the place. If your design is so brittle that I need to care about which browser I am using, I just go somewhere else. If you don’t care about me, rest assured that it is reciprocal.
I would so love to move to IE 8, but our call switch which is only 5 years old, has reports which won’t run in anything past IE 6, so that leaves all of our admin staff stuck using IE6, and sure we would love to upgrade, but guess what its only a million dollars+ for a new call switch. So its not always as easy as just cutting it out. which is why everyone says look at your web stats and make the choice on when to drop IE. Some sites / companies don’t need to target people who use IE6 and others do. A site about services for older people who tend to not upgrade, probably have to hang onto IE6 longer. Also a huge problem isn’t with IE6, but lame duck programmers from 2001-2005 era where they actually built into the software that it forcefully prevents any browser but IE6 from working, even if it would in theory work and do just fine, the program itself prevents you from using anything else. I am a web developer and agree that its time for IE6 to be long gone and a subject of computer history exams, but there are thousands of companies stuck in same position we are. Till those can get cleaned up, and moved past IE6 will be here.
The only relevant IE6 user is the user who is in a corporate environment. So normally I display a watered down version of the site with conditional comments. Should be just enough that the user can read the interesting stuff and will come back when he is at home.
All other IE6 users are not valuable enough to give them your energy.
And offcource facebook can easily drop IE6 support, because he won’t be visited from such a corporate environment.
Indeed! The mobile browser space adds new challenges. However, from what I’ve seen the mobile browsers are at least supporting CSS3 / HTML5 so you can always design your stylesheets to degrade gracefully. (Although, yes, those are extra steps… albeit not as kludgey as the hackery you have to perform for IE6.)
I hear this a lot. But… with 5 year old software maybe some maintenance could be done. Your car has to go to the garage every year.. at least. And here you don’t have to redesign the complete switch, only some reports which will cost considerably less.
Your problem is definitely not the result of lame developers, but of a company who doesn’t maintain, or care about, there information system…… And like a car: it will suddenly break down!
We could apply the 80/20 rule here, Dan, if we do,
g’bye IE6 and 7!
I took a quick look at October (tallying unique IP addresses):
MSIE 6 8.8%
MSIE 7 14%
MSIE 8 29%
This is a site for people over 45, so not surprisingly, Chrome shows 6.3%, Firefox 23%
That accounts for 80% of all unique IP agents
why are you people even using IE,,,I’ve used firefox for years with NO problems on any web sites,,,well 99%
It all depends on whether you view a visitor to your site as a potential customer or not.
I work in eCommerce for a household name car rental company. Our customer base (which we monitor WEEKLY) shows that 10% are still using IE6. That’s 10% of the company’s revenue and is not “throwaway”.
Careful analysis over time shows that IE6 usage peaks on a Monday and tails off gradually towards the weekend, when there is a sharp drop off and a rise in usage of other browsers.
This clearly indicates that a particular customer segment are placing their orders at work, where there is a high probability that IE6 is the corporate browser. And before you say “well why the heck don’t companies get rid of it!” it’s not that straight forward.
Our company has literally dozens of internal applications that were originally designed and scripted in IE6. They simply don’t work in the most recent version of IE, let alone Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
Had the development teams been able to predict such a rapid shift in browser development, chances are the company would have opted for a different, more progressive corporate browser. But we are stuck with it for now, as are many many other organisations all around the world.
Be careful in dismissing IE6 as unimportant. Unless you really don’t value your clients, then by all means tell them to throw away revenue!
Writing different code to handle browser incompatibility is definitely, a pain but not “caring about IE6 Visitors” as the title of the blog suggests, is also addressing the symptom not the root. It makes one think there are a group of users out there who are so passionate about IE 6 and refuse to upgrade and therefore developers need to retaliate by refusing them service. I am shocked too to learn from some of the comments that several people agree with the author without really asking two main questions: “Who are the IE 6 users and why do they continue to use the browser?”.
But before I address these questions, I would like to say that regardless of the percentage of IE users out there, the decision to ignore old browser users is usually not one made by developers and it largely depends on how that percentage translates to dollar amount. Take for instance, you are a manager, and have your team spend 80hours writing code that supports IE 6, if your site handles a million orders a year (yes a million, there are sites like that out there), then I believe even 1% IE users will pay for itself.
With respect to “Who uses IE6 and why they still use it” question, consider that there are still a huge number of users out there who are not technology savvy and are even intimidated by the mere update popup. To them the question is update what, and why? To some the auto update may even be turned off on their machines. And let’s not forget that even the tech-smarts out there, often we update to newer browsers and revert immediately or have to fix something to get it to work. How do we expect average users to address those issues?
I don’t have a solution to the problem, but what I would say is that the decision to ignore a certain group of browser users should be made with careful analysis with customers in mind. As developers and service providers, we do have customers we serve. Not every feature we implement will yield an optimum ROI, some features will yield above normal ROI, and others will be subnormal. Implementing features for old browser users can definitely be one that does not yield a good ROI, but that is business and I hope shareholders can understand that too.
“… upgrading to a newer version of IE is FREE!”
Unless you happen to be running an OS which doesn’t support IE7/8/9, in which case you have to pay to upgrade Windows and, if the hardware’s not up to scratch, the hardware as well. So somewhere in the region of $1000-worth of “free”.
Sure, Firefox or Chrome will probably work, but that doesn’t count as “a newer version of IE”.
I read a blog post recently that said developers that did not code for all browsers were being irresponsible. That is utter rubbish!
It was valid a few years ago when IE had very little competition; making sure that your site worked on what little competition there was was the responsible thing to do then. But, times have changed and attitudes need to as well. Now the only reason a developer needs to code for a browser is to increase the value to the developer (or the developer’s company), it is not the same as altruistically ensuring that IE competitors get a chance. And, there is no altruism in trying to support individual users who, as has been stated above, can upgrade for free.
What would be truly altruistic and responsible is if developers did not try to support all browsers on the market. Not even all current browsers. If the developers, all developers that is, determined for themselves which browser was currently closest to standards and only supported that, we would not be in this ridiculous situation in the first place. Browser vendors would be pressured into supporting the standards because their user base would be forced to go with the competition otherwise.
Sure, there would be substantial loss of value to the Web developer initially, but that’s what makes it altruistic. What makes it responsible is that the overall cost of developing a web site would come down after the browser vendors capitulated and stopped acting so self important.
Are you still going to be using IE5.5 in 5 years, or Office 97 in 10 years? lol I dont think so Steve:)
“Customising your website for a particular browser has always struck me as really stupid.” – I agree and thats why I’m betting on SilverLight, we are all so sick of compatibility issues and have lost faith.
I dont care if IE9 renders HTML 1 million % compliant, they’ve already cried wolf once (IE7, IE8) and look how much grief it cost the industry!
“That is why I am better on Silverlight”?
Please tell me that was sarcasm…
Upgrading my browser is not up to me (multi-billion euro world wide company, I’ll upgrade when they do). BUT… I’m after the CONTENT!!! Why deny me access to the content I’m after just because you’re more interested in rounded box corners or transitional backgrounds??? Whenever I see a message that says my browser is out of date, I see “If you can’t see my whiz-bang CSS effects, you don’t deserve my content. Go somewhere else!” (whenever possible, I comply).
There’s a simple solution … use IE6 for your switch and use Chrome or Firefox for everything else … it doesn’t cost a penny to have more than one browser installed.
It’s more that developers in the early noughties bought the line that standards don’t matter, all that matters is working with IE6. It’s just those Free Software hippies who care about standards.
Us hippies have been telling you about this since before it happened. We’re telling you the same about entrusting your data with Facebook, google et al, but you’re no more likely to listen.
If you need us, we’ll be the bearded geeky-looking types using something GNU/Debian-ish (we’ve got lots of enterprisey variations now too, like Nexenta/OpenSolaris, as well as the *BSDs) sharing information between ourselves quite freely.
But I know that you won’t need us; Sharepoint will do you for now. Until the next change.
We’ll still be here for you. We’re nice like that.
PING:
TITLE: My Top 9 Disruptive Conversations Blog Posts For Q1 2011 (They aren’t all from 2011)
BLOG NAME: Disruptive Conversations
With the end of a quarter of the year, I’m always intrigued to look back through Google Analytics and see what were really the top posts that people visited here on Disruptive Conversations. No matter what I may think are…
PING:
TITLE: My Report into the FIR podcast – November 29, 2010
BLOG NAME: Disruptive Conversations
Sent in my regular weekly 5-minute report this morning for today’s “For Immediate Release” podcast episode. In today’s report I discussed: The NY Times article about negative publicity and Google search results, including: The GetSatisfaction blog post…
I have recently seen a supermarket use Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and Lotus Notes 123! And that was October 2010! That software is at least 17 years old!
Exactly – if only 6% of your site’s visitors use IE6, it is tempting to ignore them. My main site, which gets ~5000 hits/day is not optimised for IE6… I’ll just test it while I write this post, I haven’t checked for a long time, nor do I care, how it looks in IE6.
My other site gets ~3 hits per week, but every single visitor matters.