Should we support IE6 anymore? [closed]

Answer 1

This depends so much on the context of the application, and of its users. There are two key aspects: what browsers are your users using; and how important is it that they can access/interact with your site.

The first part is generally easily establish, if you have an existing version with stats (Google Analytics or similar is simple and great) or you have access to such data from a similar app / product.

The later is a little harder to decide. If you're developing a publically availalbe, ad-sponsored site for exmple, it's just a numbers game - work out how much of your audience you lose and factor what that's worth against the additional development time. If, however you're doing something specifically at the request of a group of users - like an enterprise web app for example - you may be stuck with what those users are browsing with.

In my experience those two things can change significantly for different apps. We've got web apps still (stats from last week) with close to 70% IE6 usage (20% IE7, the rest split between IE5.5 and FF2) and others with close to 0% IE6. For relatively ovbivous reasons, the latter are the kind of apps where losing a few users isn't so important.

Having said all that, we generally find it easy to support IE6 (and IE5.5 as others point out) simply because we've been doing so for a while. Yes, it's a pain and yes, it takes more time, but often not too much. There are very few situations where having to support IE6 drastically changes what kind development you do - it just means a little more work. The other nice benefit of supporting it (and testing for it) is that you generally end up doing better all-round browser and quirks testing as a result of the polarity of IE6's behaviours.

You need to decide whether or not you're supposed to find workarounds, based on the requirements of your app/product. That's it's IE6 isn't really that relevant - this kind of problem happens all the time in other situations, it just so happens that IE6 is a great example of the costs and implications of mixed standards, versioning and legacy support.

Answer 2

It depends on your audience, and whether the cost (development, maintenance, opportunity cost of developing to a 7 year old lowest common denominator) is worth it to gain those IE6 viewers.

Also worth asking - is the IE6 demographic likely to care about or use your site? I think a large amount of IE6 users don't care about new technology (duh) or are accessing the web from corporate networks which restrict browser installations. Maybe those viewers aren't worth the effort - only you can answer that.

I was happy to see that Apple's Mobile Me site won't support IE6.

Answer 3

It depends on your target audience and if you think you can afford to alienate users. If you are making a geeky web app and you think most users will use firefox, then don't worry about IE6. I would launch with it working in Firefox, IE7, and Safari and look at who goes to your site. If you see the need to make it work in IE6 then start working on it then.

Answer 4

It would be nice if we could deny support for terribly non-compliant browsers. The problem is, denying IE support hurts your site, hurts your prospective users, but doesn't hurt IE. That's note exactly what we're going for. I propose a different technique. What if all anti-IE developers put a "Please stop using your crappy browser" splash screen for all IE(6) users accessing their web site. They could provide a few good, simple reasons to switch, that the user can't ignore, but then allow the user to access the (IE compliant) site. That way they could get the point across, without hurting themselves (much), or the user (except a little).

Answer 5

Keep always in mind your target audience, client needs/requirements, project objectives and of course keep it real (according to your budget/time)

Code/design a site that fits most browsers is not an easy task you will need to use those so called "hacks" to work-around common problems (yes mostly on IE browsers) this is something I personally discourage but I've been there when the target it's mostly IE.

Nowadays you have several options, you can choose to detect what browser its in use to browse your site and trigger an script to recommend an alternative browser that follow better standards (with or w/out showing a legible content) or you can code an alternate entry page for those IE fellas or what (most of the time) I prefer is to gracefully degrade the page and make the user aware about his/her outdated browser and recommend an option.

I have read you're using a CMS to create these sites, most CMS work "fine" on most browsers out of the box still as you pointed some CSS and JavaScript elements doesn't work as you go using more "edgy" techniques.

If you intent to develop more sites allow me to recommend the following sites:

To try how your site looks on several browsers (versions, OSes, JavaScript, Java, etc.) you can use

http://browsershots.org/

Compare your favorite CMS options try

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

To start learning (x)html, css, php and more you can go to

http://www.w3schools.com/

A good CSS reset style sheet is the Meyer's

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/

I have to say that this is an starting point to archive consistency across browsers :)

I am sure you may have hear or know these sites they are just tools I use from time to time looking for reference, new knowledge or alternatives I can also recommend several FF extensions like Web Developer Toolbar and FireBug.

I guess it's all for now, hope it helps and wish you happy coding/webdev.

Answer 6

You might want to take a look at IE7.js.

IE7.js is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

Their IE9.js claims to:

Upgrade MSIE5.5-8 to be compatible with modern browsers.

I have not tested this myself with Acid or other standards tests, but this might be promising.