Should we support IE6 anymore? [closed]

Answer 1

Ask your customer this: are they willing to upgrade to Vista? If they say yes, then don't support IE6. Your target customers are the people who goes "whoa! vista. drool". They're also the kind of people who want the fastest and most powerful computer.

If your customer goes, "huh? what's vista? I want my screensaver of cats back please", then you need to support IE6.

In short: if they have Vista, then they don't have IE6. The irony is: for web developers to finally get rid of IE6 and its legacy, they have to promote Vista or hope that Vista will be successful.

Answer 2

Is it time to do away with IE6 programming?

Yes.

Answer 3

If you don't want to spend effort in supporting your site for IE6 you could possibly use any one approach in the below URL.

These approaches suggests the user to download any of the advanced browsers like IE7+, Firefox 3+, Safari 3+, Opera 9.5+ or Google Chrome

http://garmahis.com/tools/ie6-update-warning/

But, that's about IE6. I believe you should still support IE7.

Answer 4

My guess is the majority of IE6 users these days are due to a large number of companies/organizations that are stuck with illogical browser upgrade fear.

I work as a contractor for the US Government and, as of the time of this post, the entire Heath and Human Services department of the US government is still standardized on IE6 (and doesn't appear to be planning on upgrading anytime soon). When I ask the IT people about it, they claim it's too expensive for the government to test new browsers for compliance with security standards, but I get the sense the real reason is they are afraid of having to deal with things rendering differently across browsers.

Answer 5

Depends on the situation. A site like this, were most people are techy I think it is safe to assume people have the latest browsers.

However if you are open to a wide public of possibly not-so techy people, you'll probably have IE6 hitting your site alot.

Answer 6

I'm a coder for a group that creates free templates for gaming clans. Our view is that we will drop IE6 support when IE8 is fully released. But at the end of the day, as many people have stated, it depends on your user audience. Our target audience is relatively wide (people download and use our templates in places where we can't predict) - however it is primarily gamers who are generally smart enough to keep their software up-to-date.

I find my natural coding style works in IE6 on my first try usually, and the bugs are easy enough to root out so maybe I don't find it as much a pain as other people do. Personally I'll drop support for IE6 when it reaches it's end of life or IE8's full release - whichever comes first.