Thread

I’ve never supported IE6, but hey I’ve only been in the game for 7 months now.

I have forgotten that….IE6? Is that something to eat? dunno, and dont care :coolsmile:

Seriously for a moment; if I look at the statistics of my sites in the Netherlands, about 15% still use IE6. That is just to big of a number to ignore. At the same time I think most of these users are not really design aware and probably working on old systems.

I do use the <!—[if lte IE 6]> script in header, with an alternative CSS. In my last project I decided to serve a more simple version of the site without all the bells and whistles, but still a bit acceptable. That does not cost too much time and I won’t have to maintain it, it will become extinct by itself.

I don’t know how it is with you all, but most of my clients would be very unhappy to know that they miss out 15% of their customers because we’ve had it with IE6. I’ve already had mails from customers that noticed that ‘the site is not working’.
And as mentioned before these can by employees from bigger companies with a prehistoric IT dept. Better to serve a basic site then nothing at all…

EDIT: As mentioned before, the best politics might be to offer an IE6 version as a separate addition. This way everyone’s aware of the limitations and work involved. If you don’t, clients might expect similar output for all browsers as in this thread

I am making a step to not support IE6 as a standard browser in 2009. I think there is a large enough swell in the web community that killing IE6 could be a reality. As part of this move clients could pay additional money for the support of IE6 but in general I would love to just ignore this mess of a browser. Even doing simple stuff requires hacks and work arounds that frankly I am just tired of having to do…

That’s exactly what I do, too. My projects are bid out to be XHTML and CSS valid, and to render acceptably on MSIE 7x, MSIE 8x, and, of course Firefox and Safari, Mac or Windows. If MSIE 6.x support is required, it’s an extra cost, and, frankly, substantial, sometimes doubling the cost of a project.

I know it’s been said before—Microsoft is an obviously evil company and their spawn (various versions of MSIE, IIS, extensions, et al) have caused enormous harm to the web. Enough already.

Seriously for a moment; if I look at the statistics of my sites in the Netherlands, about 15% still use IE6.

On my site that amounts to about three visitors a week. :red:

I’m seeing 10-percent to 20-percent of IE visitors still using IE 6.x, though the number is slowly dropping. Too slowly.

Well this of course depends very much on the target audience.

My personal site has 8% IE6 visitors, I do also run a primary school site with 35% IE6 :ahhh:

I do use the <!—[if lte IE 6]> script in header, with an alternative CSS. In my last project I decided to serve a more simple version of the site without all the bells and whistles, but still a bit acceptable. That does not cost too much time and I won’t have to maintain it, it will become extinct by itself.

I don’t know how it is with you all, but most of my clients would be very unhappy to know that they miss out 15% of their customers because we’ve had it with IE6. I’ve already had mails from customers that noticed that ‘the site is not working’.
And as mentioned before these can by employees from bigger companies with a prehistoric IT dept. Better to serve a basic site then nothing at all…

Just to clarify my first post.  By dropping support for IE6, I don’t mean that our websites will be unusable in IE6.  We’ll certainly ensure that the content is accessible.  However, we’re not going to spend time troubleshooting IE6 and more importantly, limiting ourselves based on IE6’s feature set.

I completely agree that alienating an entire block of users isn’t a good idea, especially for a commercial site.  For my personal site, I don’t even test in IE6.  It could be completely unusable for all I know.

I definitely agree that IE6 should just disappear into a cloud of bad-smelling air but sometimes life just isn’t so simple… For me, it’s not really a matter of “trying to move the web forward” or “doing what’s best for us all”, but more a matter of being realistic - not that reality is always kind.

Large corporations have trouble updating systems, browsers, and so on and so forth simply because they’re cheap. Time is money. Time spent re-vamping massive corporate apps, updating browsers, transferring bookmarks, re-training staff and etc. all mean money. If you take it from their perspectives, what’s to gain except a boatload of hassles and extra money spent?

I mean sure, we do it every day. We debug, we re-code, we hack, but someone’s paying us to do it aren’t they 😉

As the market moves forward and other browsers start becoming more prominent, I may also jump ship on the whole IE6 thing but until my Google Analytics account reads less than 5% of my visitors using IE6, then I’ve honestly got my hands tied. Sure it’s easy for us to say suck it up and download Firefox, but for the Grandmother with her 8 year old PC or the corporate executive in charge of finding a company for their website re-design, your site is simply broken, not by any fault of theirs. They see broken, they leave.

Even if not fully I will continue to support IE6 for a while to come. Right now I’m re-designing my site and despite my extreme hate for IE6 and the countless hours agonizing over CSS Selectors and malformed JavaScript (pft! what does it know…) I still suffered through. Yes it sucks, yes it’s a pain, but it’s life, albeit hopefully only for now.

An “_” here or a “*” there never hurt anyone 😉

P.S. I am still not implying I like it, but that’s just how I see it right now.

I’ve decided to do something about IE6 this year - call it a new years resolution if you like 😊

Previously IE6 hasn’t caused that *much* grief with the types of site I normally build, but every project does to take time tweaking to make it behave acceptably.

So this year I intend to have “IE6 support” as an added extra to the cost of the site, clients will be informed of what it means, and it will be up to them whether they want it or not.

So long as we keep supporting IE6 people will still use it, and many will see no reason to change…

I’m getting ready to launch a new site and I’m ignoring IE6. I agree, it’s time.

So long as we keep supporting IE6 people will still use it, and many will see no reason to change…

I so cannot agree with you more. I think the fact that we as designers don’t make a stink about this relic of a browser means that people do not understand why they should upgrade. Security alone would be reason enough for me. Anyway, I think the fact that Google, 37Signals and plenty of other designers are dropping (wearenotfreelancers.com, ajaxian.com etc) support for IE6 and the fact that IE7 is 3 years old and about to be replaced means that it is time to let it go. If we as a collective group start to a)charge more for supporting it or b) just stop supporting it at all the more people will start to get the point.

And we need to stop making excuses for large corporations. You mean to tell me that they cannot upgrade their systems or their platforms in 3 years? Give me a break….

This is just me personally, but I really like the approach that the Panic (http://www.panic.com) website uses. Instead of just totally ignoring those on IE6 and making their site unusable they just have a friendly message at the top of every page informing the use that things may not always work/look as expected in IE6 and it also offers a link to download Firefox. For the time being at least, it just makes more sense.

But I would definitely consider charging extra for IE6 compatible designs and code…

And we need to stop making excuses for large corporations. You mean to tell me that they cannot upgrade their systems or their platforms in 3 years? Give me a break….

Money is money, and that’s what it comes down to 😉

Dunno but if some corporation uses old browsers for its workers to allow surfing, does that make costs to security part also? I’m not so familiar with IE6 but as far as i can think, its full of “this and that-holes” so you need to fix “this and that” to make it safe?

Anycase, IE6 is going down someday and we can start the mission to boost the deadline for it =), dont we?