Should we support IE6 anymore? [closed]

Answer 1

If you're writing an application that's free or open to the public, maybe give reduced support to IE6 in order to have time to build more things for the majority of your users.

If you're writing an application that's not free, base it on your users. Odds are you'll want to give IE6 full support for another year or two.

Answer 2

Simply because IE6 still represents 27.21% of the web's population (or 15.21% depending on your numbers) as of July 2009.

Now I know some of you will probably tell me that if more and more sites stop supporting IE6, the browser will eventually disappear. That's a lie.

---

Picture this:

Corporation ACME has over 150 000 computers all running Windows 2000/XP. They also have a nice intranet site developed 7 years ago which works in IE6 quite well, but not so much in other browsers.

Do you really think they are going to invest money into fixing their intranet application when they control their complete IT infrastructure and who gets what updates? It's less costly to just postpone the update until they migrate to a new system.

A lot of corporations are in that situation.

---

Here is another example:

Business FooBar sells its products on the Internet. A little more than a quarter of their traffic is coming from IE6, which also means a quarter of their sales.

Do you think FooBar will simply block off those customers or annoy them with a huge notice telling them they are using a buggy browser? That would cost them nearly a quarter of their sales! As long as there is monetary value to supporting IE6 (and it does and will till its market share drops below about 8%), IE6 will prevail, which is also why Google won't be phasing out support for IE6 anytime soon.

---

Campaigns such as Browse Sad do not understand the mentality of the corporate culture (change is costly) and do not understand that in the end, consumers have a negligible impact on the worldwide IT ecosystem. The big corporations control it.

_{Consumers do have a growing impact but it is still insignificant compared to the impact corporations have.}

And let's be truthful here: everyone who has the technical expertise and who could upgrade to a better browser already did. The rest are people still running outdated OSes, don't know how to upgrade, or don't have admin rights on their machine.

Answer 3

I recommend people check their own user stats for their site before making this decision, but here's a common reference regarding popular browser versions :

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Answer 4

Sadly, we still need to support IE6 in most cases as it still represents a significant portion of the internet surfing users. If you are in a corporate environment, this is even more true, as corporations have less incentive to upgrade stuff the works simply for some pie-in-the-sky "web standards."

If not, try to gmail approach and just toss up an error for IE6 viewers and/or display a disclaimer that if they upgrade, the site will work/look better.

Answer 5

Yes (emphatically) and No (doubtfully).

Unless you are creating some manner of internal tool for a group where you know IE6 penetration (no pun intended) is high; ignore IE6. With vigor.

As for IE7, it's a bit of a toss-up. Generally speaking, if you are aiming for the private sector, you can get away with ignoring it (for the most part) and assuming that your IE8 support will take care of the most heinous problems; but if it's a site for selling stuff (specifically a web-shop; sales pitch site, etc.), you might want to at least check that it looks somewhat sane, and add a few small fixes as appropriate.

As an aside; and a real-world example; at my site of employment (we do web sites) we are currently undergoing (or rather, considering) a shift vis-a-vis IE-support in general: Prices are stated with basic IE8 support; full IE8 support would cost ~10% more; IE7 ~30% more and IE6 support ~100% more.

Edit: Think of it as charging extra to make a camper wagon designed for a WV to work with, respectively, a pinto, a yugo and a horse-drawn carriage.

Answer 6

depends on your target audience.. I mean, some universities have firefox on them, right? only (i think) the third world countries have IE6 for default. (I know, I see them) I don't know about other countries, though. But I'm pretty sure still a large chunk of the population still use IE6 by default. If you think it's really necessary ( I think so), go ahead. I don't see any problem in it. ('cuz I'm inexperienced in software development and such.. XD)