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

How to convince your boss?

1) User browser stats

2) cost of hacking work minus profits from supporting the few users

Money is the thing, make him do the math.

Answer 2

One of the problems with ignoring IE6 is that a lot of business users are still running it becuase either they don't know how to upgrade or they are not allowed to upgrade because of the IT security policy.

So if your these people also are the ones that actually pay you, you have a problem with ignoring IE6, as it will upset your paying customers. I used to work at a company where we had an online job board, and the income would come from the companies posting the jobs. But at the fall of 2008, we still had 25% of the users running IE6.

With that said, I'm not going to support IE6 on a new project that I'm working on, despite the fact that it will have companies as paying customers. We hope that by the time that we launch, IE6 will mostly be eliminated)

Btw, the solution we created at our job board had a normal clean, standards compliant CSS sheet, and then one with IE6 CSS hacks. If the browser was detected to be IE6, a CSS reference would be added to the style sheet containing hacks, a long with a reference to a javascript for implementing transparant PNGs.

Answer 3

The rule for talking to business people is always: sell your idea in terms of profit. In this case, how much money do you make off of customers using IE6, and how much money does it cost you to support IE6? In many cases you're losing money by supporting IE6. In other cases, you are making money, but if you forced your user base to switch to IE7+ or a real browser, some of your users would leave but enough would stay that you would be making more money. And in some cases, you can complain about it, but the best decision is to still support IE6 because it's still the most profitable course.