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?"

Comments

Why redirect them?

[arndawg]

You could just let IE6 "try its best". And use a big red notice bar at the top with a link explaining it.

Re:Why redirect them?

[brentonboy]

Agreed. This is why browser sniffing is bad. Just design it to be standards compliant, and let the browsers that can't follow the standards fail, hopefully gracefully. Blocking IE6 users completely is just pointless.

Re:Why redirect them?

[Jedi Alec]

It's even worse than pointless. I'm typing this on IE8, but it identifies itself as 6 to appease some of the dreadful apps used on the intranet. So even though the browser should be perfectly capable of rendering the site, filtering based on browser version will lose yet another set of potential eyeballs.

Depends on who you cater to

[ResQuad]

Depends on your clients. If you're talking about a mostly technical crowd? No, probably don't need IE6. If you're talking about a site for corporate users, yea, you need IE6. There are many major companies out there still running IE6 on XP. It sucks, they should all switch to Firefox (Or Chrome, or Opera, or anything but IE), but unfortunately most don't have a choice in the matter. Oh and if you're trying to sell people something, then most likely yet again.

Of course it all depends on what your usage stats/analytic say. Personally, I've not supported IE6 for a long time, but then on most of my sites Firefox is more than 50% of the market.

Not needed

[BhaKi]

Actually, no browser should be explicitly/directly supported. Only standards need to be supported. The browsers and their makers should be forced to comply.

Re:Not needed

[mwvdlee]

And you'll tell your visitors to browse your site with the W3C Validator?

I'm sorry to inform you that most people that might browse your site exist in a realm called "reality", you should visit it some time.

Re:Not needed

[Eivind]

Agreed. But it's still a good thing to code to the standard, because it's also real that a site is easier to maintain the less browser-spesific hacks it employs.

It also matters what kinda functionality is lost in older browsers. If the site don't work at all with IE6, and 10% of the visitors use that, then that's definitely bad. If (to take a random example) border-radius isn't supported by IE-6, so those 10% visiting with that browser, get square corners rather than rounded ones, that may well be acceptable. (especially since supporting round corners in ie-6 means using fugly badly-maintainable hacks)

Wish we could :-/

[SplatMan_DK]

Get rid if IE6? Boy I wish we could. But we can't.

Our 4-man startup software company targets medium sized corporate customers (250-2500 seats) and they are still using lots of old computers with IE6. There are many reasons but a few of the most noticable ones are:

1.) a ton of old Line-of-Business applications still uses IE6 for presentation.
2.) a surprisingly large amount of corporate software uses embedded IE6 components in their GUI.

Most of these corporations have installed newer browsers on their machines (some of them even installed non-MS browsers) but IE6 is still there - under the surface - because critical business applications are still depending on it.

All those Line-of-Business applications are extremely hard to remove. They often solve critical business needs so nobody wants to throw them away. They work and "do the things they were built to do". And since they just work there is no budget to replace them with somerhing else. The people who created them have left the company years ago so nobody really knows exactly how and why they are implemented.

But everbody knows this about their old LOB apps: they neeed IE6, they still work as intended, nobody can tell how to make an alternate solution, and there is no budget to analyze or re-implement them (and why would anybody want to - right?).

I imagine this is quite common for many corporations around the world and not just in my region.

- Jesper
   

Re:Yes and No

[mwvdlee]

My stats indicate more visitor use IE6 than Opera (all versions combined) or Safari (all versions combined).

If IE6 is dead, then so are both Opera and Safari.