Should we support IE6 anymore? [closed]

Answer 1

Vista's failure to gain mass acceptance is largely responsible for the reason we still have to support IE6. Most of the people still using IE6 are the ones who never upgrade their browser or update their OS. If most of them just moved to Vista, IE7 would automatically replace IE6

Answer 2

Under IE6, make it at least show something. A page for FF3 that just dies on IE6 just looks bad, like you didn't plan well. If you don't support IE6 at all, make sure the user knows it is deliberate by showing a special page advising them where to go.

If you are expecting corporate visitors, it has to work under IE6 even if only a simplified version. If not, you can drop IE6 entirely if you handle it well as described above.

The time is nowhere near ready to consider dropping IE7 though. I'd expect this is the default browser on XP, which is the most prevalent OS.

Answer 3

I'm all for pushing users to upgrade to the newest available version of IE (since problems improve with every release), however I'm also against telling people to upgrade or change their browsers.

I still support IE6 on my website. I even support as far back as IE5.5 pretty well I think.

Generally it is a good practice to never force your users to upgrade their system just to view your website. Unless, of course, you're developing an internal application, then I'd say everyone should upgrade to the newest available version.

Answer 4

I am certainly opposed to excluding browsers from a public facing site. There is nothing more irritating than going to a website and discovering they ONLY support IE because some dev somewhere couldn't make things "work".

As many of the other authors above have noted there is a considerable number of users out there who use a company imposed desktop build or install of IE6. Your best bet is always to identify and communicate with your users, not impose your draconian concepts upon them.

Ryan Farley had an entry about this recently which describes what I think is the best first step to transitioning over users to a different browser. It encourages people to upgrade and explains why things may not render correctly in one graphic. Many years ago, BinaryBonsai.com was the first blog I encountered which had a badge appear suggesting FireFox and I totally downloaded it just not to be bothered with an additional graphic.

There really is nothing like nerd peer-pressure.

Answer 5

Someone asked the same question about a week ago and got some good answers. My personal favorite was doekman's suggestion to try IE7-js.

Answer 6

Dean Edwards' ie7.js makes IE6 behave (mostly) like a respectable web browser. It requires the client to have Javascript turned on, but that's a reasonable concession to make. I use that script and the script from Save the Developers on sites I create, and it makes supporting IE6 a breeze.