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Is Internet Explorer 6/7 Support Required Now?

k33l0r writes "Following Google's announcement ending support for Internet Explorer 6, I find myself wondering whether we (Web developers) really need to continue providing support for IE6 and IE7. Especially when creating Web sites intended for technical audiences, wouldn't it be best to end support for obsoleted browsers? Would this not provide additional incentives to upgrade? Recently I and my colleagues had to decide whether it was worth our time to try to support anything before IE8, and in the end we decided to redirect any IE6/7 user-agent to a separate page explaining that the site is not accessible with IE 6 or 7. This was easy once we saw from our analytics that fewer than 5% of visitors to the site were using IE at all. Have you had to make a choice like this? If so, what was your decision and what was the reasoning behind it?"

1 of 512 comments (clear)

  1. IE6 outdated. by Tukz · · Score: 4, Informative

    We're a web company, making different kind of websites for different kind of people. Which means we make anything from small "Mr and Mrs Smith My Pink Pony" kind of sites, to web shops with 5k+ transactions per day.

    We recently (within the last year or so) put a note on our contracts, stating we don't support IE6 anymore, unless the customer is actually paying extra for making the appropiate changes. It was just too much a hassle to manage all the hacks and workarounds all the time.

    So basically, we state we only support the latest generation of browsers, included IE7 since the migration to IE8 isn't complete yet. A lot of people still on IE7.
    And IE7 isn't TOO bad, the work arounds is mainly CSS, the rest is worked out by MooTools, Prototype, etc.

    --
    - Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -