Do you plan to support IE 6 on your future projects?

Question

I\'m trying to make a pitch to my boss to drop support for IE 6. I find that a disproportionate amount of time is spent on trying to make the css IE 6 compatible and that co

Answer 1

We develop web applications for a customer that has a policy to run IE6. I don't understand that, because IE6 has still got security flaws that makes it safer to upgrade to a newer version. I have actually seen official statements by the norwegian government that instructs IT sections in the different departments to upgrade to IE7 because of this. But since our customer have a different policy, my hands are tied...

Answer 2

Get your hands on some user statistics for each individual website you're going to work on. Get the browser usage statistics from the past year, not more, no less. If there is still a significant amount of IE6 users (I personally go for more than 5%) it is probably worth supporting IE6.

If it's less than whatever you deem a reasonable percentage of users, so in my example: less than 5%, you could simply use this fact to try and convince your boss.. and ultimately.. your client.

Further arguments you can use are: Better use of CSS selectors, better support for PNG images without hacks and making the world a better place.

Unfortunately though, IE6 is here to stay.. not because the users are nefarious bastards, but simply because some companies take way too much time to upgrade their software.

Answer 3

If it's a paying gig, tell them you'll charge more unless it's an assumption going into the project. That's the only way it's worked out for us so far. I'm all for backwards compatibility but the amount of money wasted on supporting IE6 for most websites/applications is just ridiculous.

Answer 4

When developing sites for clients, I absolutely support IE6. Unless I get the explicit permission to skip it; and guess what, that hasn't happened yet. In that case I restrain myself from using techniques that I know won't work in IE6. There's always another way to do things, even if it's slightly less pretty.

When toying around with my own stuff that I'm not planning on making any money with, I explicitly give myself the permission to skip IE6 to be able to try some new, fancy stuff. I try to have it at least degrade gracefully though.

Is this overall frustrating and not much fun? Sure. Live with it.

You can't just decide on a whim to drop support for a major browser, unless practically nobody in your audience uses it. If you have hard data that regularly only two of your visitors every month use IE6, you can consider dropping support for it. But as long as significant number of your visitors use it, and even 1% is quite significant, you'd only harm yourself.

Answer 5

Like it or not, IE6 is here to stay for a good while yet.

The best you can do is use frameworks and libraries (like jQuery) that make life easier for you.

Answer 6

IE is tied the the operating system and since support of XP (IE6) is coming to an end i would say No.

Vista/Win7 will be running later versions of IE. But it will take some time for people/companies to upgrade.