Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade
Why do people still use IE6? This is a browser that’s been released in August 2001 — that’s over 7 years ago. It’s old, it’s got hundreds of compatibility issues, it’s not particularly secure and neither does it have many features we come to rely on today in modern browsers. It doesn’t even have tabs. But statistics show, that a sizable chunk of the internet is still surfing on IE6. There are a few reasons why…
First of all, people who use IE6 probably find that it works for them. The services and websites they visit online work fine on it, so there is no incentive to change. Another reason is many internal IT systems were built to use IE6 specific features (that aren’t even compatible with IE7) and so companies cannot upgrade the browsers on their systems unless they spend money upgrading their internal applications. Another reason is that people just don’t know about other browsers.
If we as developers want people to use a modern browser then we have to give people an incentive and information to upgrade.
If you spend hours hacking your site to work perfectly in IE6, you’re taking away any incentive from slow adopters to drop their old browser. All the hacks and legacy support that we implement on our sites is the reason IE6 still has a large market share.
Look at the share of browsers on your site — do the modern browsers have a majority share? If you drop IE6 today, is the share of people on other browsers big enough for your business? If IE6 is the minority, then it may not be cost effective for you to continue supporting it. Look at the hours spent hacking your site and wrapping chains around your feature set just to cater for a 7 year old browser.
Don’t think that dropping IE6 support will also drop that whole chunk of the user base — it won’t. Provide a message for IE6 users visiting your site informing them of browser incompatibility and give them the links to upgrade to a modern browser. Helping people upgrade at no cost to them isn’t something negative — it helps both them and you. People in companies whose IT systems depend on IE6 aren’t chained to it either — they can download and use a modern browser to visit external sites and services.
Marketing great browsers like Firefox and Chrome is all well and good — but we need to provide a push to those still using IE6 by dropping support for it. If we don’t, people will just keep using it. Drop support on your blogs, personal sites and sites with a majority modern browser share. Start phasing out IE6 support from the web, and IE6 will die.
P.S. Oh and yes, Usability Post isn’t compatible with IE6.
I wholeheartedly agree, but I can’t tell you how many jobs I’ve lost because of IE6 problems. I’ve had several preliminary meetings with clients where they insisted I use their machine and projector to show off my portfolio. Go figure, they ran IE6. And it wasn’t pretty.
I like the idea of charging a premium for clients who want IE6 support, as Adii (adii.co.za) suggested. Add on 20% if they want the support. That will change a lot of people’s minds, therefore increasing the number of sites out there that don’t work right in IE6.
It’s enough of a pain to get things to work in IE7, but juggling two versions at once is just nuts.
“If we as developers want people to use a modern browser then we have to give people an incentive and information to upgrade.”
No, if we as developers want people to use our site, we’ll make it work on what they want to use.
You don’t need to do -anything- to get people stop using IE6. Before long, enough people will upgrade and you can ignore it without losing more than a couple percent of your customers. That’s how it went with IE5, IE4, etc etc. If you spend all your time grousing about how the most common browser doesn’t do all the new neat flashy things, you will -never- stop complaining. It’ll always be that way.
The only thing that’s possible and even close to what you suggest would be to please the customer on the popular browser, and then add extras on the best browsers on top of that. THEN you can suggest people upgrade without losing your job for making it look crappy on what the customer uses.
I totally agree with identifying the targeted audience browser base first. All sites are not equal.
I dropped ie6 support for my own blog, because I know vast majority of my potential readership isn’t using IE6. GoogleAnalytics told me so too.
However, when I’m at work designing public government sites, IE6 must be supported.
Lastly(web apps not included), most sites don’t suffer too much if coded, laid out in a semantic, simple way. IE6 glitch is more common when the design layout is more complex to achieve certain aesthetic goals.
I actually wrote an article on my blog about IE6 not too long ago, but it was goofy :)
Carry around a USB drive with Firefox Portable on it and use that for your demo. Problem solved except in the most picky of orgs.
In theory, that’s a great idea Dmitry. The problem is that the persons who still use IE6 use it because they don’t know how to upgrade their browser. That, unfortunately, is a problem that wont go away.
Good idea but slightly unrealistic.
Support IE6 but have javascript alerts with upgrade information. Let the user know their browser is out of date. Provide them with links to download the latest browsers (IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera).
> Provide a message for IE6 users
> visiting your site informing them
> of browser incompatibility and give
> them the links to upgrade to a
> modern browser.
I agree with this, *as long as* you let them continue into your site anyway.
There is nothing more annoying than a website that is holier-than-though and thinks it can decide your browser for you. How many times have you been stifled by a site that refuses to load on anything but IE? Yuck.
It’s quite different to say the following in a call-out on your front page:
“Note: This website has not been certified compatible with your older version of Internet Explorer. You may wish to upgrade to a newer version.”
than to say the following and block access to your site:
“Error: This site is not compatible with your older version of Internet Explorer.”
The first message is inviting and lets users decide for themselves if they want to brave your (probably quirky) website, or if they want to upgrade.
@Vance
Yes I totally agree. What I had in mind is some type of container that slides down from the top of the page. Nothing too obtrusive that would prevent them from viewing the website.
I feel that if enough websites were to support a method such as this, you would eventually have the user upgrade.
WC said “Before long, enough people will upgrade and you can ignore it without losing more than a couple percent of your customers. That’s how it went with IE5, IE4, etc etc.”
Actually that’s not how it went, assuming you meant people upgraded browsers themselves.
IE6 is still popular because it’s shipped with windows XP. that’s how windows users(users as in everyday people, not tech savvy ones) upgraded to IE6. Same is happening with IE7+Vista. Majority of the users use whatever browser comes with their OS. So “before long” is about 7 years for IE6.
Another issue is that there are some large business providers that will only support ie6 as an option to connect to there services. Not to mention the IT depts. that won’t allow anything else in their environments These will keep ie6 as an enterprise browser for a long time coming.
As you mention, some organizations can’t upgrade to IE7 because of application compatibility. In my organization, we have apps developed by a major 3rd-party vendor that don’t work in IE7. It’s a multi-million dollar issue, so it isn’t like someone can just decree “starting Monday, we use IE7″ or “just get the IT guys to fix their app”.
I hate hate hate IE6, but I love my job and therefore must continue to support IE6.
Such is life.
I think you’ve got it backwards if you’re proposing that people will upgrade because developers refuse to put the effort to make their sites work properly on a particular browser.
People upgrade mostly because their old computers break and the new ones come with IE7 (Win) / Safari (Mac) / Firefox (Linux) pre-installed. Or because of their friends’ well-meaning word-of-mouth about better performance/security/whatever.
I wouldn’t expect to convert people with an agenda that goes along the lines of “do my business a favor”.
Try visiting my website at http://ra-ajax.org with IE6 and you’ll see a “solution” ;)
I think something simple as a notice bar at the top of the page that informs visitors that they may experience visual and functional incompatibilities when browsing with their current browser and a link to where they can upgrade is a good idea. This isn’t rude or demanding, and certainly won’t stop them accessing the site anyway.
If I boot up Windows 95 and try to install some new software, it’s likely that it might not work because it’s incompatible with an old OS. I don’t expect software developers to provide support for all operating systems, just the ones within reason — so today I would expect Windows software to work on XP and Vista, not 95. In the same vein, I expect sites to work in Firefox, IE7 and Safari. IE6 has reached its end of life.
The problem is that everyone is still hacking away to fix visual and functional issues in IE6. People who are happy with their old browsers aren’t early adopters. They don’t care what new features Chrome has — IE6 works for them because, unknown to them, developers spend countless hours behind the scenes making sure things just work. We’re taking away the only incentive for these people to upgrade.
Not only that, but everyone is complaining about it, too — and with good reason. I think a lot more sites can drop IE6 support today than they realize, and this will no doubt speed up its market share decline.
I find it surprising that a usability expert (i.e., someone who is concerned that the web is accessible and usable for all) would take this position against nearly a quarter of Internet users. I didn’t like IE5, I don’t like IE6 or IE7, and I’m sure I won’t like IE8 (I work on a Mac w/FF), but I can’t afford write off 25% of Internet users. I guess us Mac developers have just had to accept from the get-go that we have to cater to inferior browsers.
Ray: Sure, I’m definitely concerned with usability, but I look at it from the viewpoint of progress. New technology offers potential for greater usability because of the features it offers.
For example, I did a post recently on using drop shadows on pop-up menus to help them stand out better, implemented with alpha transparent PNG images. IE6 doesn’t support PNG alpha transparency by default (you can hack it to make it work, but sometimes it won’t be perfect). That’s just one of many things IE6 doesn’t have. It’s an old and outdated browser.
This isn’t even a fight for anything — there really is no point sticking to IE6. When IE6 is phased out, web development would become much easier because modern browsers are standards compliant and handle javascript and ajax much better.
Modern browsers let people make better interfaces and deliver better experiences on the web — that’s what we should strive for. We shouldn’t cling on to something outdated that only slows down progress.
By hacking and patching our sites to work with IE6 we give an illusion to the uninformed that everything is fine, that their browser is working great. It’s not — their browser is outdated, and we should help people upgrade so that everyone can enjoy a better web.
The thing is this: web developers are essentially “connoisseurs” of the web experience. But lots of people (hence the overwhelming acceptance of Microsoft’s browsers) are happy to just “get on the Google,” as one of my neighbors described it. As professional web developers, we have to be willing to accept that, and not be dismissive of anyone who doesn’t possess our “elevated” taste or awareness.
This is not an argument in favor of IE6, it’s an argument in favor of an inclusive web. Someday IE6 will go away: good riddance. Until then, I think it’s a good idea to serve IE6 users web pages that work in their browsers. Boo hoo.
I enjoy reading this site, keep up the good work.
I enjoy this site too btw. you have original content, that’s hard to find these days.
You’re aware that 37signals announced phasing out support for IE 6 across all their products?
http://37signals.blogs.com/pro.....hasin.html
I can see that IE6 may be a pain in the *** when developing a web site with a very complex design. However, when that’s not the case (i.e. most of the occasions), an experienced web developer knows what tricks to use to make IE6 behave. To implement such tricks is easy and won’t take a lot of extra time.
Talking about time: If you’re skipping IE6 support because you’re short of time, I think it’s time for you/your salesperson to do a better job and make sure that you’ll get paid for it the next time. It shouldn’t be hard to convince your customer to pay a little more to make the web site work in IE6 (there’s a high probability that your customer is using IE6, right?).
When developing a web site with a complex design, the targeted audience usually use modern browsers, so the IE6 problem may solve itself. If you don’t want to spend a couple of extra hours on making the web site work in IE6, you could at least use some conditional comments to show an “upgrade-your-browser”-message for such users.
In the end I think that developing a web site that works in both modern browser and IE6 (and possibly even older browsers) is a sign of true professionalism, so it’s just a matter of how you want to be perceived as a web developer.
Thanks kevin and Jin — I’ll keep at it :)
J: Yep, I use their products and I am very pleased to see people like them drawing a line and cutting off IE6 support. Time spent working on IE6 support is time lost working on new features. Other notable drop recently was the MobileMe service from Apple, though that may have been largely because IE6 doesn’t support two letter TLDs (”me.com”).
Jonathan: I’ve not had any cross browser issues while building this site, other than with IE6. The layout code is valid. It’s been the same with all the previous sites I worked with — there are virtually no problems with modern browsers like Firefox, Safari and to most extent IE7, yet there are always many issues with IE6.
Now, I can certainly fix those issues and get my sites working in IE6, and I agree, that is a sign of a good developer — but really, all this time spent fixing stuff which shouldn’t be broken in the first place is 1) demoralizing and 2) time you could have spent doing something better. IE6 may have been a good browser 7 years ago — it’s not now. It’s age is showing and it’s draining energy and resources from the whole web design and development community.
We can keep fixing it, or we can inform the people who visit our sites that they are using an old browser and should upgrade. The cost to upgrade is nothing compared to hours spent maintaining IE6 support. I strongly believe we should play a more active role in phasing IE6 out.
To be honest I would love to drop support for IE6 but the company I work for design websites for schools in the UK and a majority of our clients use 6. Period.
Many of the schools just don’t have the money or technical knowhow to upgrade all there old computers so it’s just how it has to be. Yes, some clients use ie7 and even safari but just not enough to jetison 80% of our business.
I plan on offering the most basic support for IE6 on my personal site and will actively work towards getting people to upgrade.
My rule is: make it work in IE6 but only the bare basics.
You should have a look at http://ra-ajax.org/ which is trying to promote people to upgrade their browsers.
Sorry that should have been http://www.pushuptheweb.com As you can probably guess I had also just been checking out Thomas’ site too :)
does website needs to look same in every browser click here
Fine in principle. The problem is corporate internal IT admins that are hell bent against change regardless of advice as for some unfathomable reason they would rather stick with old, insecure technology than actually have to do work upgrading software as appropriate. Then they moan about the security problems that they help perpetuate
I still have IE6 installed just because I don’t like IE7 or IE8. The ActiveX control that IE7 has is a memory hog and it is used by other programs (Eclipse, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk etc) so I don’t want to upgrade to IE7. As a main browser I still use Firefox or Opera or Chrome however.
I use a solution, which is based on Javascript and IE-specific comments : this way, I can always keep my pages, HTML & CSS clean and standard. When IE6 is gone at last, I’ll just have to remove that script.
Obviously, the limitation of this solution is that if javascript is deactivated, that won’t be usuable at all - but as it is enabled by default, even in IE, I think you can rely on it for the major part of your visitors.
Granted that people that still use IE6 don’t care about their web browser, we can count on the fact that they don’t have turn javascript off.
What I like about this solution is that it allows you to have the cake & eat it : you support IE6 *and* you don’t write crappy code.
More here :
http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
Seeing it actually working *without any effort* is a bit of magic : the box model implementation is right, etc.
I think that it should be enough to include a statement in a new website, saying, that ther website doesn’t work with IE 6. Otherwise the “normal” internet user will not realize, that he is working with a stupid and not reliable browser. Sometimes I provided also a link to a firefox download site. The problem is really: how to cope with wishes from costumers. I think we should communicate that this issue is about burning time and money (fuel supply by microsoft), not only for the developper, but also for the company.
The next generation of websites will definitely not care of any IE6 bugs.
Mathias Will, germany
“In my organization, we have apps developed by a major 3rd-party vendor that don’t work in IE7. It’s a multi-million dollar issue, so it isn’t like someone can just decree “starting Monday, we use IE7″ or “just get the IT guys to fix their app”.”
Thats some serious nonsense, if your company has expensive software like that then it should have the cashflow to match and it’s just a scale problem. The lack of forwards compatibility means someone else was sleeping too.
Useability is a non issue too in this discussion: the visually impaired who actively use the computer have special software and support and undoubtly keep up with the latest and greatest(not the cutting edge). The elderly have grandsons/granddaughters that can do the upgrade for them or neighbours.
Flash doesn’t ship with windows afaik and everyone manages to get that installed, whats the problem here?
Also regardign the OS and supplied browser, gues why the OS got upgraded in the first place: because the native apps demanded them. If it wasn’t for those apps ppl whould still be using dos 6.2 and be content with it.
That’s a great point about Flash Michael. All the sites with flash and videos on them need it, and there is no way around it. They provide a message asking the user to download it — and it works. Most sites currently don’t ask users to upgrade their browsers; I think they should.
If one of my developers decided not to support IE6, they would be looking for a new job. It’s not up to developers to decide what browsers they will support, except on their own personal websites. If a client has decided not to support IE6, that’s fine, but most clients aren’t aware of the browser issues and don’t make those kinds of decisions. Our clients expect websites to work, period. It’s up to us to include IE6 as one of the browsers they work on.
I just noticed one of my sites had less that 1% of the views on IE6!!! If I had a blog I’d write about it because now I can drop support, and I’m very excited.
But on my other sites seeing 20% or more IE 6 users… No way…
And is a notice or message practical on E-commerce sites where I’m trying to guide customers into a sale with as little distractions as possible. Do I want to encourage them to leave to DL FF or Chrome or anything else for that matter. No!!!
I under stand both side of this argument but as designers and professionals we sometimes have our hands tied.
I COMPLETELY agree with this post. Down with IE6! Compatibility is a nightmare for a front-end programmer. Oh how I wish the ridiculously massive stats for IE6 usage would just go away already…
… But job #1 is still to please the client. If the client is not computer savvy (as most of them tend NOT to be), then the unfortunate professional thing to do is to spend the extra time hacking the site to work on IE6.
Testing can be a pain - especially if you run Vista. Check out this post I wrote: http://www.casjam.com/blog/200.....-on-vista/
@Jack: I totally agree with you and Dmitry use a JS framework, learn the IE6 rendering bugs (and tackle them) and stick to YUI’s http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/ Support Chart.
I work in IT and we are developing new applications and our target audience browser is always IE6. Our end users are financial institutions which are usually the last to upgrade. In fact, we have not upgraded and are blocked from downloading IE7!!
So, as in any good design, you need to understand your users and if your users have IE6, then you need to accommodate them. That is part of knowing your users!!
Ray said he was surprised that a usability expert would take this view point. But I’m surprised more experts aren’t taking this view point.
There is no benefit of designing for IE6 other than to keep the people using IE6 happy using their browser.
The moment nobody supports IE6 thats when they’re going to realize they need to upgrade.
Great topic and I completely agree.
I’m curious to know if those of you who plan to stop supporting IE6 also plan to tell your clients that you’re not supporting a significant part of their audience (currently between 20-30% on general audience websites).
Call me old-fashioned, but I think if your client’s paying you, it’s his decision, not yours. Maybe your clients look at things differently than mine, but my clients aren’t particularly interested in creating problems for 20-30% of their audience either to (a) make my job easier, or (b) impress the 1% of their audience who might know the difference with how standards compliant their websites are.
It’s a great fantasy (wouldn’t life be wunnerful…), but I’m making a living developing websites for paying clients who want their websites to work for everybody who has an Internet connection, so it’s not reality. Hey, I thought it was a big deal when I could finally drop support for IE5.
WHAT IS MORE LIKELY:
A) If my site is broken in IE6, users will switch to a different browser.
B) If my site is broken in IE6, users will switch to a competing site.
IE6 users are either lazy, incompetent, ignorant bastards who are afraid of their computers, or at work. In either case, they’ll switch URLs before they switch browsers.
You can stop supporting IE6 when it stops being cost-effective to do so. Until then, stop whining and do your job.
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I’m running Windows Vista Pro Ultimate and I can’t even install IE6.
This makes testing impossible so I have to have another machine…
Eventually the older machines will not be fast enough, MS will win the XP to Vista upgrade battles and IE6 will go away.
And in response to the comment: “Call me old-fashioned, but I think if your client’s paying you, it’s his decision, not yours.”
I am being paid to know more about the web than my customer. He is paying for my expertise. I don’t pretend to know what my auto mechanic is doing specifically and stand over his shoulder giving him instructions on how he’ll make a repair.
It seems a lot of people struggle with this concept. We are professionals. Our job is to not only know what we are doing, but to be able to clearly communicate why we are doing it.
We shape the industry. If we let our customers dictate everything we’ll end up with 2 billion blog-sites and ’swiss army knife’ styled messes.
If IE6 followed some sort of ‘older standards’, I would understand wanting to keep support, but IE6 never followed any standard, so it should have never been supported in the first place.
I’d like to note that the post was addressed primarily to decision makers — i.e. people who have the last say over their projects. This doesn’t mean people who are high management, but people who run their own start-ups, blogs etc. — areas where you can afford to do this. Obviously if you’re a web designer working for a client you should talk to them about IE6 support and implement it if they require it. This is a no brainer — solid cross-browser support is very important for many sites.
However — if you are working on your own site, e.g. as I said above, running a blog or launching a start-up, then IE6 support is something you should review the benefit of; and if you can, drop it.
If you stop supporting IE6, provide a message for IE6 users telling them about this and how they can upgrade — this just needs to be a simple one sentence with a link. As Michael pointed out above, technologies like Flash don’t ship with Windows. A pop up appears when you visit your first flash site asking you to install it. Most people aren’t that dumb — they’ll figure it out.
It’s all well and good having new cool features for Firefox, or flashy new browsers like Chrome — but average people use stuff that comes on their computer that works. Adding great new features to new browsers won’t get people to upgrade — phasing out support for IE6 will.
It is time to declare independence from IE6 http://idroppedie6.com/
[...] Drop IE6 Support - Give a Reason for People to Upgrade by The Usability Post [...]
We cant tell the client that they have to update their browser.
[...] UsabilityPost.com resolvi adiantar o assunto. 40% dos usuários desse site utilizam o Internet Explorer 6 como browser, fico muito triste vendo isso, porque, o usuário não sabe que está utilizando um navegador tão antigo e ultrapassado, lançado em Agosto de 2001. Possui uma série de incompatibilidades e falhas de segurança. Mas você não é culpado por isso, pois o Browser trabalha sozinhos, todos os sites que ele visita funcionam corretamente nesse browser, certo? [...]
Great article! It’s a good idea, and at some point we need to drop support (reminds me of Netscape 4.x). I’m at an organization which also uses legacy apps that only work on IE 6. Hopefully we’ll have many of these apps replaced in the next year.
I put in the footer of my web applications:
END Internet Explorer 6!!: The Developer of this Site refuses to Support I.E 6 browser fixes.
maybe the hacking community should kill it.
[...] at usabilitypost.com , Dmitry Fadeyev posted a brief but good writeup about why we should drop support for IE6 in order to give people a reason to upgrade. Based on a [...]
Mmm I’d consider usability to include being usable to people as they arrive at the website - not saying hey and now download this browser or plugin for whatever the reason.
I think the problem is not the user’s, it’s ours as developers. Trying to make it the user’s problem goes in the face of usability, does it not?
If somone finds it difficult to locate a sub-page of information on your site via normal navigation, for example, or it’s 2 clicks deep, then how much more unusable is something if you hit them with extra information not about their needs.
Say I went to my local council site to find out when rubbish removals were going to happen? Please tell me where from my user perspective IE6 comes into that paradigm? No, that’s not the users problem.
Provide a less enhanced solution for IE6 by all means. But expecting this to move off our desk and onto the unpaid mass of users is kind of naive. IE6 is a reality of the industry we’re in.
Just my 2 cents.
[...] Dmitry’s post from earlier in the month Drop IE6 Support - Give People a Reason to Upgrade has a few holes that need to be addressed. It seems a growing wave of web developers, and more [...]
Hi Steven,
I will definitely agree that forcing a user to upgrade their browser isn’t a very good experience for them — you’re putting a barrier between them and your site’s content.
My stance is based on a sacrifice, the benefits of which I believe outweigh the cost. Modern browsers have progressed far ahead of IE6, and today that browser only acts as a barrier to progress than anything useful. By killing it, we’ll have a better web.
When sites are faster to develop and easier to test, developers have more time to spend on things like aesthetics and usability, not worrying about breaking anything in IE6. By pushing progress, the usability of the web as a whole would improve. IE6 was designed for a different web — a web of table based layouts and static pages. That’s the world of web 1.0, which is long gone :)
If we didn’t dare ask users to install anything, we wouldn’t have Flash as that doesn’t come pre-installed with Windows. I think people will upgrade — we just haven’t really asked them yet.
Hi Dmitry, I expect most people not developers don’t care. Its a tool and they need to fulfil a function on a website, and if I can’t get my clients to upgrade to use Basecamp after October 1st, then I have zero chance of effectively achieving this via my site to total strangers. And the cost should never be the users, regardless of the reason.
I’m not saying that IE6 needs the same experience. Sites that degrade to a reasonable usable level in IE6 are perfectly fine, the myth of pixel perfection is what needs to be busted. I wouldn’t recommend giving no styles to IE6, but definately take advantage of advanced CSS features to enhance the experience for everyone else.
I recently got called into an office BTW with Firefox not working on a site. I said Firefox? Really? So I got in there and it was Firefox 1.3 that had scrollbars in the content rich footer. All I could say was that’s the experience that browser provides at 1.3 - it was usable right? My point being that with browsers having rapid iterations nowdays graceful degradation is the best you can really hope for.
If my client is happy with the scroll bars in 1.3 then I’m happy.
I just wouldn’t recommend intrusion with scripts or notifications, and definately not demands to update or be bounced. That IMO is flicking a technical issue back at the user.
All mini drivers must upgrade to a car with real suspension or they can’t use the M1 anymore… mmmm.
Obviously a provocative post though, plenty of opinions. Mine is obviously just one.
Does Microsoft still officially supports IE6?
If Microsoft will drop support for IE6 altogether and replace it with IE8 or better on all systems that support these modern browsers with a drop of a switch in Windows, then we all will be happy.
Until then, keep fixing IE6 errors and better stop complaining if you call yourself a professional.
I may be wrong with this but is it not correct that users of Windows 2K are unable to upgrade to IE7; thus accounting for a huge amount of business users having to use IE6?
Dropping support for IE6 does not mean closing your website to IE6 users.
It just means that IE6 users might have a few visual issues with your site.
Put a warning on your site for IE6 users notifying them of this and a link to the new upgrade (IE7) and you should be fine…
This will probably be faster than spending hours making your site work on IE6. And it certainly won’t loose you %25 business…
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You should never discriminate against your users browsers. Just downgrade the content if it is that bad on IE6 but do it gracefully. A message telling them they have the wrong browser just makes them LEAVE. Not everyone controls which browser they use.
You also didn’t really address what companies who cannot upgrade due to having systems that rely on IE6 should do?
Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade…
Why do people still use IE6? This is a browser that’s been released in August 2001 — that’s over 7 years ago. It’s old, it’s got hundreds of compatibility issues, it’s not particularly secure and neither does it have many features we come t…
While I despise sites that have “This site is best viewed in Internet Explorer at 1024×768″, I totally agree with your post. I wouldn’t go as far as forcing the user to upgrade their browser to view the site, I would think it’s OK to display a warning to the user letting them know they can upgrade and not go out of your way to make it IE6 compatible.
I’ve seriously considered dropping all support for IE6 for my client’s websites. I’m kind of already doing it anyway. But obviously, we all have to consider the impact of doing that.
I know a lot of people still use IE6, but really, who are those people? Anyone I know who still does is usually an older person who rarely uses computers.
[...] Give people a reason to upgrade [...]
im all for simply charging a premium to the client for ie6 compatibility. its your time as an agency/developer. its billable time. if you spend 70% doing standards code another 10% doing the minor fixes for all the major modern browsers and then end up spending 20% of the time trying to ‘get it right’ in ie6 then thats something you need to make clear to the client.
technology in these parts of the world moves on. you wouldnt hand someone an 8 year old phone and tell them to check their mail with WAP and get over it on a 5 row display. i dont see anything wrong with making clear the time segmentation and where its going to the client and letting them make up their mind. back it up with high-usage site tracking, even their own data if they have it already.
for large businesses with reliance on ie6 for legacy web apps theres no excuse to not allow for firefox or opera to be installed along side it to allow for usage of the latest features. its comparable to saying that since Word has tables and windows comes with calculator you might as well just chug along with that rather than using Excel. Why cant IE6 & FF3/Opera/Safari live together on XP or maybe earlier..
I’m optimistic though that we’re starting to see a more rapid decline in IE6 as a major browser, and in particular in demographics that we as developers have to support or provide for.
[...] Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade [...]
Here is a polite notice from my site which is linked from a polite footer message targeted towards IE6 users, it also links back to this article here.:
We have taken the decision to drop the support of older versions of Internet Explorer. While we would never exclude anyone from our site because of the web browser they are using, we also can’t guarantee that the site will function and display in the exact same way between a browser that was released in August 2001 and a modern equivalent browser.
Internet Explorer 6 has many incompatibilit y issues with current web standards and web developers spend a considerable amount of time hacking their site and introducing workarounds in order for their sites to display correctly in an obsolete browser. We have always tried to make our site cross browser compatible where possible, but this is becoming increasingly impossible with new technologies emerging and it’s also increasingly time consuming.
We feel it is time that people and corporations upgraded their browsers to a current modern browser. We are expected to keep this site up to date, we regularly monitor the development of the software we use here and update accordingly. We do this in order to protect our site and also that of the end user, failure to do so would very likely result in the suspension of our account with our host.
It’s good common practice to keep software up to date, why a web browser should be any different is beyond me. But, it is clear from statistics that a large percentage of people still use Internet Explorer 6, this needs to be addressed. We are not the first site to drop support for it, there are many sites that are pulling the plug on IE6. We won’t bar users from the site, it will still be usable, but we will no longer consider whether the site looks optimal with IE6.
There are excellent free alternatives to Internet Explorer for the home user, Firefox, Opera and Google’s new Chrome are a few to mention. I personally have used Firefox for many years. Firefox has quite an arsenal of tools, plugins and themes to choose from, it also features Tabbed browsing, which contrary to belief is not an invention of Microsoft. If, however you are content with Internet Explorer, now is a good time to consider upgrading.
The company I work for still uses IE6, so don’t assume it’s personal.. They need to upgrade too!
-Zetan
Related:
* Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade
* Most popular web browsers
Upgrade your browser today, it’s for your benefit as well as ours!
The notice in red in the footer of the site is targeted towards users of browser versions, lower or equal to, Internet Explorer 6 only.
It does not display in any other browsers.
Forgot to post a link to the article:
http://www.slayingsteel.com/index.php?page=97
feel free to adapt and use.
Hello all,
After some calculations, the amount of IE6 users (on client base, not personal), seems to strand on a comfortable 13% … Joy!
(mainly EU visitors)
http://isie6dead.com/
http://isie6dead.com/
At the moment I’m not updating the IE6 sites for any of my clients because I’m using Vista and I cannot install a stand alone version of IE6, which I was able to do with XP.
I have advised my clients of the situation and suggested that they change to Firefox, or upgrade to IE7. The majority of my client base do not live in the city, they live in rural areas and they use 56K modems to access the internet because high speed is not available. I have been told that it takes to long to download via the 56K modem and most of the users won’t even try.
I would love to kill the support of IE6.
[...] Usability Post (Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade) [...]
[...] is dying slowly; maybe it’s time we drop support for [...]
[...] This guy brings up an interesting point - that IE6’s ability to stick around is because of developers like me (and probably you) - “If you spend hours hacking your site to work perfectly in IE6, you’re taking away any incentive from slow adopters to drop their old browser. All the hacks and legacy support that we implement on our sites is the reason IE6 still has a large market share.” - view Drop IE6 [...]
I disagree strongly on not offering support for IE6 users. My big clients and myself can’t take the chance of failed branding, lost clients or public bashing due to such “incentives”.
I do, however, include a very visible, non-dismissible but unobtrusive alert on the top of each website I design, if it’s being viewed on IE6 or lower. It contains a brief reminder of the security issues the browser poses, and links to all the main superior browsers. You can see it in effect by using IE6 to access Style Lesson for example. It’s in Romanian, but it says “You have an old and dangerous browser! Please upgrade for your own safety! Choose between…”
[...] I dropped ie6 • Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade « Usability Post • Should I / Could I drop IE6? • Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products • [...]
[...] Go to lala-land and simply stop supporting the browser all together. [...]
I totally agree with the article. I refuse to support IE6, and if a client insist that I build a website that’s compatible with IE6, I charge him 50% extra. ^^
[...] usabilitypost.com: Drop IE6 Support [...]
Really interesting article and really interesting comments!
Believe it or not, I work in a media agency and still, nowadays, around half of my colleagues use IE6. I’m starting an internal campaign to upgrade, also with the IT department.
[...] Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade [...]
IE6 sick!
[...] Usability Post | Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade [...]
[...] Usability Post | Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade [...]
[...] are eagerly awaiting the day Internet Explorer 6 dies. While there are a number of opinions in the community on when we should drop support and how we should encourage users to upgrade, the (sad) [...]