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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?"
You could just let IE6 "try its best". And use a big red notice bar at the top with a link explaining it.
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.
snowulf.com
Actually, no browser should be explicitly/directly supported. Only standards need to be supported. The browsers and their makers should be forced to comply.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
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. -
That's what it comes down to: corporations. There are still too many 10,000+ employee corporations out there that run Windows XP with the Flash 7 plug-in and IE6. You have to support that or there is no client.
My employer hasn't switched from IE6. Does anyone have tips on how to convince them to move to IE8? We have exactly zero software which requires IE6; in fact, some of our software doesn't work properly with it.
How well does page support standards and is it designed that blind people can run it trough voice syntetisator or Lynx to read it with the "blind keyboard".
I would not like that any page is designed for specific browser at all. Was it FF, Opera, Safari, IE etc.
... as you've done. What percentage of those IE users are still running IE6/7? Then ask yourself, "Am I willing to lose X% of my visitors to save Y% of coding effort?"
For any typical website which depends on traffic for revenue, I'd say you'd have to be nuts to cut support for IE 6/7; thats about 35% of the visitors to your site. The fact that only 5% (and not 62%) of your visitors use IE at all, however, indicates that you're not running a typical site (or there's an error in your metrics collection).
I (attempt) to keep my websites standards compliant. If it works in your browser, great. If not, not my problem. I'm not jumping through hoops to help support companies actively ignoring agreed upon standards.
However, I'm also not financially dependent on my websites...
If "security was tight", IE would not be allowed at all.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
I should have clarified. My sites are all now built for HTML5 and every attempt is made to stay standards-compliant.
While users with older browsers are redirected, the entire site (short of the few pages with directions) use those standards and are still visible selects the ``I know my browser was made in the 1800s but I still want to see your site'' link.
It's code and pages that I wrote one and just copy into new sites. *That's* what I wish more people would do. We could all gently urge those who either don't know or don't care and perhaps make the web a better place, one user at a time.
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
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
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.
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Remember: The only thing you can achieve by supporting those “browsers”, is to be an enabler. Basically the only reason those people still use IE, is because they can. And the only reason they still can, is because you still code for IE 6/7. And the only reason you do that, is because people still use them.
Do you see the circular logic here?
Someone has to break the cycle. And you can bet your ass that it won’t be the users. It’s your job. It’s mine. After all we’re the experts for a reason.
Don’t be an ass. Be nice. Don’t push them. Pull them. Coming from IE6 to a full-featured modern browser with HTML5-enabled sites, is freakn’ great! It’s like opening the box of your shiny new electronics device (or whatever you like) and playing with it all day long. Get that feeling across! And you will see them getting dragged in in the euphoria, switching in the blink of an eye.
People don’t change anything if they think they don’t have to. It’s called efficiency. But sometimes it’s bad. E.g. when there is a lack of information.
So if you think that they should switch, then just code close to the standards. If they want to use their site, it takes them five minutes to install a recent browser, and they know it for years.
Still supporting IE 6/7 is similar to acting like those EA managers, who would never dare to do something innovative, edgy, fresh or even slightly offending, to get a target group as big as possible... and then ending up with a shitty target group because the result of your work is bland, average, plastic-fantastic, non-innovative, boring shit that nobody hates but that also nobody loves.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I’ll be an example to you:
I left my well-payed day-job because my boss (who was a very powerful player on the net) wouldn’t let go of IE6. (I had to write webapps for that piece of shit.)
I’m happy and would I have the choice, I’d do the exact same thing again. Just earlier. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
... as it is that of the browser vendors. As web developers, we NEVER should have coded to anything but the W3C standards. Browsers would have been forced to fall in line, and this fascinating banter would never have been necessary. While I have always tried to just code to the standards, I can understand the position other are in, with their PHBs squeezing them to do stupid things.
Though it'd never happen, I'd like to see W3C monitor all web content, and have the power to issue DNS deregistration notices to all non-compliant sites.
Dear Sir,
we have determined that you site, www.microsoft.com, is not compliant with the W3C 'xhtml1-transitional' standard it claims to implement. You are advised that you have 14 days in which to make the aforesaid site fully compliant. Failure to do so will result in the immediate suspension of your Domain Name registration, until such time your compliance is proven.
Have a pleasant day.
Standards compliant pages support lynx pretty well, lynx will simply ignore things it doesn't support and render the alt-tags instead of images etc. So long as you chose sensible names for the alt tags the textual page content is perfectly viewable. I use lynx quite often and find it great for getting to information quickly on well designed sites, without being distracted by any of the fancy graphics.
IE6 doesn't degrade gracefully, it doesn't ignore unsupported features like lynx does, it tries to render them and botches the job totally.
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What's tight at these locations is compliance auditing more than security.
In many environments, these compliance requirements have the force of law, and it can be a long up-hill battles to change a poor, "hack" compliance regulation, such as "Use Internet Explorer 6 with these settings and patches", to an effective one (use a browser that supports the following security...).
Since the ostensible purpose of compliance is security, many people mix the two concepts.
When I worked at a job that not only used IE6, but used a heavily-locked-down IE6 that wouldn't even let me change the homepage.. I ran Portable Firefox from a USB drive and stopped caring.
So.. it has come to this
As a web developer, I hate supporting IE6. It lacks so many things that make the web a better place today (poor CSS support, no PNGs -- yes there are fixes).
I've found it depends on your target demographic. If you are looking at business people, IE6 is still in the ballgame. Offices are still lagging behind in their conversion to modern browsers. This is probably because the IT staff just doesn't care.
In talking with user groups, I've heard people say (frequently) that they prefer Firefox or Chrome at home, but at work aren't allowed to install those browsers -- so they are forced to use IE6 during work hours.
Lynx isn't obsolete, it's last stable release was July 5th 2009. It is still in active development.
IE6 has a zillion quirks in it such that the easiest approach is often to have one website for IE6 and another for everything else.