From M. Dave Auayan at IE Death March:
Internet Explorer 6 will be SEVEN years old on August 27th. It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.
It’s time to put a deadline on dropping IE6, and I say that time is now, and the deadline should be soon, say like, March 2009. That’s roughly a little more than 6 months. Feel free to join me.
And don’t think for a second that this is the only “Give IE the axe” campaign … Oh no! There are quite a few out there already. Elliot Jay Stocks says Death to IE as well.
As of now, I’m no longer including it in the standard project scope. If a client wants IE6 support, it’ll be an optional, charged-for extra.
While I agree that “fixing” (being nice here) a site to work in IE6 is a total pain the rear end (again… being nice here), according to TheCounter, IE6 is still used by 37% of internet users (for July). That’s still quite alot. So what do you do?
I think Elliots’ way of charging for IE6 support is the best way to handle this mess.
One comment that struck me on Elliot’s site is a great eye opener:
I bet you still put accessibility features into a site and I think the numbers of people who use those features are very much less than a third of the internet population.
How true it is. We slave away making sure out site is accessible to all but the number of users using Lynx or some other test browser is MUCH less than IE6 users. So why do we support them? Because they have NO CHOICE in the matter. And IE6 user CAN use another, better, browser. Not a person with certain disabilities. THAT is the difference!
I was always of the belief that you should support the latest two versions of IE. So for me, IE6 will be dropped when IE8 comes out.
So… what will you do? Will you totally drop support for IE6? Will you charge extra to support it?
Tags: IE6, Internet Explorer
I believe that graceful degredation is the answer here. Yes IE6 is old but its popular. Its rediculous to think that you would close the door to 5% of your visitors, yet alone 20%+.
I find that between 1-2% of a projects development time is spent addressing IE6-7. Usually this is only a handful of CSS statements to correct minor issues. In the scheme of things this is not long at all.
It is asked above whether web designers should charge more for IE6. Isn’t that a silly question? For me the time to develop IE6 is factored into the project costing but then again so is everything else.
Until the day comes when the cost of displaying a well rendered IE6 page exceeds that which the client can make from IE6 visitors it should be supported. After that a small message should be displayed. “Internet Explorer 8 is now availible. Please upgrade now.”
As for killing off the browser. Microsoft is already doing it one computer at a time. Vista is packaged with IE7. As XP fades away so will IE6. It will take as long as it takes. Punishing IE6 users in the meantime just doesn’t seem fair.
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I am definitely with you 100%. And in response to Jason sure, if you aren’t trying to anything unique easy fixes suffice, but aren’t we all tired of being forced to deal! Toss it already! If your company still has you in that dinosaur then they are falling asleep at the wheel.
That’s what makes web design such a great field to be in, everything keeps changing. And generally for the better so in my not so humble opinion “I am sick of dealing with it.”
When you have to jump through hoops to find a working copy anymore it seems pretty silly to me. If I find myself having to download a quarterly copy of a Microsoft issued fake hard drive I think it’s time the rest of the world catches up!
We were discussing this today, a colleague of mine and I, both CSS Developers and we agree, mandatory upgrades! LOL
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