Should we bother about IE < 8?

Question

It might look like philosophical question, however it really bother me. We\'re expecting HTML 5, we\'re using JS, Ajax, Flex, all this stuff, but when older browsers were develo

Answer 1

In our company (about 5000 employees) it is company policy to use IE6. Some intranet apps are just not compatible with newer versions of IE ... much less with Firefox, which I tend to use whenever I can. But most of the employees are not in the IT department so I guess they just use IE6 as ordered...

Answer 2

How many people use IE6 now? And if someone upgraded to IE7, doesn't he already upgraded to IE8? ... So - IE6 users are mostly corporations (the have to use it, becouse of some contracts), and we can't count on miracle change to IE8.

The website I've been working on (protein-protein interactions), serving mostly R&D audience, has about 1200 unique users a day. 30% of them use IE and the numbers break down to:

• 45% IE8,
• 30% IE7,
• 25% IE6

As these numbers suggest, being able to upgrade to IE7 doesn't necessarily mean they'll go for IE8.

Based on previously posted numbers, you can expect from 5-10% IE6 users. Should you care about them? Well, if they can't even use your site, and you earn a million a year, would you care about extra 50-100 grand? ;)

Answer 3

It depends on your audience, there's no single answer here.

If you have corporate customers, unfortunately you can't ignore IE6 exists in most cases, and you definitely can't ignore IE7 does they just move that slow to new platforms.

If it's for a public/internet facing website, I would only target IE7+, but that's just me....you're going to lose some users if your site is broken is IE6, it depends how much you care. Now there's a difference between "making it work" and "making it look good". If you can make it work and decent with little effort, then support everything you can...doesn't mean they get have to get all the bells and whistles.

Answer 4

Ok, as W3Schools say - March 2010 - IE6 8.9%. Every month users count drop ~2%.

IE7 isn't as "dangerous" so it can be even 10%. Thanks all of you guys.

Answer 5

My company still can't shake support for IE6. Sadly, it is the gating factor for everything we do. We have clients who are still on Windows 2000 using IE6. I estimate it causes 20% of our development overhead, at least.