Comments on: Stop Supporting IE6?

By: James Bailey

James Bailey — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 22:23:36 +0000

Yeah. The only problem I have with supporting IE6 users is A) its too much extra work and B) you have to becareful not to break the site for more modern browsers. I just think its time to let go of the past and look to the future. ^_^ That said, I was checking my site statistics earlier (bear in mind i started my blog on the 25th) I had 1 visit from an IE 8 user, 2 from IE 7 users and 3 from IE 6 users so today, 50% of my internet explorer using visitors were on IE6.

By: Dizi

Dizi — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:35:41 +0000

When I wrote this the percentage was around 10-15, which to me was a huge amount of people to neglect. Since then with browsers now making people aware of the choice, I agree that people do have a bit more of an awareness when it comes to browsing then they did a year ago, though there are still some companies that still use IE6 and don’t give the people using those systems the choice to upgrade/use a different browser.
I’m still very much still an advocate of downgrading gracefully instead of neglecting them I don’t tend to shout at designer/developers that opt to support IE7+ these days :p

By: James Bailey

James Bailey — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 14:17:30 +0000

At work we create our clients sites for IE7 and above. To be honest i dont think any of our websites support IE6 and neither us, nor our clients care since its less that 3% of all our clients site’s visitors. One thing I have found though is thanks to the rise in popularity of more modern browsers (chrome in particular) Its very rare these days that I find anyone with only internet explorer (any version) installed. Most people seem to have IE6 or IE7 and either chrome or firefox. I’ve tried to get my boss to put a mechanism in place in our clients websites that blocks out IE6 users and displays a simple step by step guide showing them how to upgrade their browsers but to no avail!

By: BK Designs

BK Designs — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:42:26 +0000

Im down with neglecting IE6 muahahahaha

By: Dizi

Dizi — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 17:51:23 +0000

Thanks for the link !b that was a really interesting read. I think its a shame that a lot of designers feel that they can just neglect the clients needs just because they don’t want to keep supporting for IE6.

By: notbanksy

notbanksy — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 16:32:19 +0000

I agree with Wizely on this one. We as web designers/ developers provide a service. People use services, so if their experience of our service is poor, we won’t get any repeat business/ recommendations.

For my own projects, I still support IE6 as a matter of course, largely because (as said above) it’s actually pretty easy if you develop with it in mind from the outset.

If you’re doing something really flashy and swanky, you could always use the universal IE6 stylesheet. http://stuffandnonsense.co.uk/blog/about/universal_internet_explorer_6_CSS/

By: RM

RM — Mon, 17 May 2010 18:56:26 +0000

I stopped supporting IE6 last year, We have to be leaders as we know about security issues and by supporting IE6 all we do is tell others that it is okay to use these outdated browsers when it isn’t.

By: Carson82

Carson82 — Fri, 14 May 2010 11:32:38 +0000

A lot of people forget that accessibility isn’t just about peoples differences, it’s about technology as well. So if a designer neglects IE6 they can’t claim that they build sites with accessibility in mind!!

By: Dizi

Dizi — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:50:51 +0000

While informing people of the risks and that upgrading is a wise choice could be a good idea, as long as IE6 has a large share in the market place it still needs to be supported. As lets fact it there are lot of browsers out there so holding 10-20% of the market is a huge percentage compared to a lot of other browsers out there. So turning your back on that many potential customers and sending them right into competitors open arms seems silly to me.

I also don’t think that supporting the browser will mean that less people/business will upgrade, they will, it will just take time like it has done with other evil browsers such as IE5.5 which was still popular up until a few years ago, and I remember all the fun times with Netscape Navigator, they were days that seemed like they would never end. So while at the moment it does seem like something drastic needs to be done, I really don’t think that punishing those that just don’t know any better or businesses that can’t afford to upgrade is the way to go about it.

(wizely we seem to be agreeing with each other a lot lately, how odd )

By: Gavin

Gavin — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:49:21 +0000

I’m in two minds about support of IE6, I tend not to have too many problems with it (or any other version of IE for that matter), I don’t use CSS hacks or conditional comments and normally it’s just the odd padding/margin issue that takes a couple of seconds to resolve so I’m happy to sort them out to get everything displaying ok in as many browsers as possible.

On the other hand if developers continue to support legacy browsers we ultimately shoot ourselves in the foot as people/businesses aren’t going to upgrade their browsers if they continue to work and websites display correctly.

For the moment your right in that a websites target audience should be the primary factor in deciding on IE6 compatibility but we need to phase out support sooner rather than later, we need to subtlety persuade users into making the decision to upgrade, slowly drop support for new sites that don’t require it and on sites that do, inform users of the benefits (both functionality and security) of upgrading to a “modern” browser.