How To Distract Clients From Using IE6

Question

How can we distract our clients from using IE6. We know IE6 is not a good standard-compliant browsers; has many issues. How to satisfy clients so that they do not use IE6?

Answer 1

Provided they have the proper permissions to do install software on their machines, use Chrome Frame. The speed boost, if nothing else, should be incentive alone.

Answer 2

make them understand that ie is not bad, its ie 6 thats bad .. if they wish to use ie they can surely use it but could use ie 7 ir even ie 8... make them see that how ie 7 and 8 provide some great features which are not there in ie 6.. also ie 8 is the only browser that follows strict css 2.1 methodology plus there are many websites which previously were running in ie 6 (with no problem) are running under a warning message that some context may not be suported by ie 6 for eg. www.yahoo.com, so why to use it?

thanks

Answer 3

Two things:

1. Charge extra -- double or treble rates or more -- to support IE6. (even IE7 these days).

2. Point out that IE6 (and WinXP too) will be losing the last vestiges of support in the near future. If you think they're insecure now, just wait till that happens -- no more security fixes. If you're still developing for IE6 now, then you're clearly not going to be ready for the upgrade in time, so you will be hacked, and hacked badly. If your client is willing to accept that, then that's his problem, but you need to help him understand the gravity of the problem. He needs to be putting his upgrade plans in now, not getting more dev work done for the old systems.

Answer 4

I'm currently in the process of building a new site for my company and I've been looking at http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/.

Essentially it's a little javascript lib that checks to see if the user is running IE6 and if so it displays a nice little overlay on top of your site. The only problem I've got with it is that it completely blocks the user from using your site. I'd like to allow for them to use it anyways but I'd like them to know that their experience may not be as good as it could be. I'm sure it can be adapted though, you should never exclude people from using your site based on their user agent. That being said I think it's a good tradeoff that you try to get your users to upgrade and if they don't wan't to they can still use your site but they probably won't see all of the fancy pancy browser tricks that you can do with modern browsers.

IE6 upgrade warning http://ie6-upgrade-warning.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/example.png

It sure looks nice anyway

Other resources include http://ie6update.com/ (not a fan though, you shouldn't trick users)

Update: Seems like someone made a bit more customizable version of this written in jQuery. See jreject.turnwheel.com

Answer 5

make a whitepaper

Answer 6

The best way is by educating them, make them aware of why you are blocking IE6. Do a comparison, case study, etc to convince them, try and put it in terms they may understand, try to convince them that using IE6 is a bad idea (whatever your reasons).

Its simple to implement a script to prevent IE Browsers from connecting to your site, however doing that may result in users being turned away. If this is a public site take into consideration the market share internet explorer has, unless your site is really incredible it is unlikely you will get a user to install a new browser.

To get around this in the past a simple splash page that informes them of the reasons not to use IE6, Example:

You are currently using internet explorer, while you may continue to browse this site using IE, please be aware that some functionality may not be available due to compliance standards within internet explorer, and due to this we do not support issues that arise when using Internet Explorer. We recommend using Google Chrome (Download here) or Mozilla Firefox (Download here).

If this is within a corprate environment you can always work with the IT department to ensure that alternate browsers are distributed. I recommend Google Chrome, simply beacuse of the ability to create "Application Windows" that eliminate problmem causing elements of the browser GUI (Back buttion etc...)