Developers to stop supporting IE6?

[creospace]

Lets face it IE6 is a pain in the backside for us who are bothered about multi browser compatibility but is it time to dump support for it?

I've been reading and hearing various stories of developers / design companies now charging a premium to add IE6 compatibility and even openly stating they are no longer supporting it.

This seems to be the only area where technology doesn't move at the same pace as everything else and not totally sure why.

Perhaps as big sites remove support for IE6 a chair reaction will start. Facebook are pulling support from March this year I understand and others will follow suit.

What are peoples thoughts on this? Should developers charge to support an out of date browser just because somebody wont upgrade?

 

[YODspica]

we stopped supporting ie6 about 6 months ago.

 

[MGDigital]

The unfortunate fact is that Windows XP comes with IE6 installed by default. Since they made a complete mess of Vista, it looks like we'll be stuck with having to support XP and IE6 for the foreseeable future. Trying to explain about browser versions and box model bugs just won't wash for non-tech-savvy clients: they just want their site to work.

You're right that the only way this will change is for big players like Google, Facebook to stop supporting old browsers. Until this happens, as a small business I can't afford not to make sure my sites work in IE6.

It's not so bad though - I just develop my sites as normal and then when it comes to browser testing I just use the "* html" trick to add separate rules for IE6.

 

[DotNetWebs]

The unfortunate fact is that Windows XP comes with IE6 installed by default. Since they made a complete mess of Vista, it looks like we'll be stuck with having to support XP and IE6 for the foreseeable future. Trying to explain about browser versions and box model bugs just won't wash for non-tech-savvy clients: they just want their site to work.

You're right that the only way this will change is for big players like Google, Facebook to stop supporting old browsers. Until this happens, as a small business I can't afford not to make sure my sites work in IE6.

It's not so bad though - I just develop my sites as normal and then when it comes to browser testing I just use the "* html" trick to add separate rules for IE6.

100% agree with the post.

There are many, many corporates and public bodies that are unlikely to move from IE6 in the near future.

I can't not afford to support it.

I develop for modern browsers and the tweak it for IE6 afterwards.

Regards

Dotty

 

[creospace]

There are many, many corporates and public bodies that are unlikely to move from IE6 in the near future.

What is likely to change that?

 

[directmarketingadvice]

Until this happens, as a small business I can't afford not to make sure my sites work in IE6.

Exactly.

And, if any web designer is producing sites that don't work properly in IE6, I hope they're honest enough to tell their prospects what the cost will be to their businesses.

(rather than saying nothing and have the client lose business)

Steve

 

[creospace]

And, if any web designer is producing sites that don't work properly in IE6, I hope they're honest enough to tell their prospects what the cost will be to their businesses.

(rather than saying nothing and have the client lose business)

Those that don't consider it important or are simply oblivious to it are hardly going to tell their prospects, they are the types that knock out sites at £99 so it's not a factor in the price

 

[DotNetWebs]

What is likely to change that?

Time - ultimately.

The sort of people I am talking about primarily use browsers for Internal Intranets. They will only upgrade if their own applications or the web sites they depend on require it.

Regards

Dotty

 

[YODspica]

Exactly.

And, if any web designer is producing sites that don't work properly in IE6, I hope they're honest enough to tell their prospects what the cost will be to their businesses.

(rather than saying nothing and have the client lose business)

Steve

our clients never incur costs for their websites not working properly in ie6. We analyze statistics in any case, If someone is using ie6 to access our clients sites, those users are not corporate people. We do provide an error page explaining the best minimum viewing options in any case, including portable access devices.

Any legal business using legal software has ie7 offered free of charge as an update.

 

[DotNetWebs]

...Any legal business using legal software has ie7 offered free of charge as an update.

True but as I said above they often won't update unless there is a compelling business case for doing so.

Regards

Dotty

 

[ozbon]

Over the Festering Season, 24Ways had an interesting piece by Jeremy Keith on the IE6 equation, for working out whether it was worth doing an IE6 version etc.

For me, my current primary client is an organisation still working with IE6 as the default browser. It makes things a pain - although not as much of a pain as if they were still on IE5.5! But that's the way it goes.

I think if you're working on a site for General Public rather than Internal Organisation you can probably get away more with designing for IE7 instead of 6 - since 7 was part of the Windows Update a while back, I think more people use 7 than 6.

But as YODSpica says, if you're doing a new design or an update to an existing site, have a look at their current stats to see what's being used. If IE6 is a minority browser, you don't have to design for it. If it's still the majority browser, you're going to have to develop for it. There's no point telling 80% of your viewing public "Sorry, but this works better in IE7/FireFox/Whatever", it'll just piss them off and they won't come back.

 

[DotNetWebs]

...I think if you're working on a site for General Public rather than Internal Organisation you can probably get away more with designing for IE7 instead of 6...

But what about all the employees of that organisation that look at non-work related sites in their breaks etc?

Regards

Dotty

 

[creospace]

But what about all the employees of that organisation that look at non-work related sites in their breaks etc?

hmmmm... Tough?

 

[directmarketingadvice]

our clients never incur costs for their websites not working properly in ie6. We analyze statistics in any case, If someone is using ie6 to access our clients sites, those users are not corporate people.

What about B2C?

I've just looked at the stats for a client of mine who has high traffic levels selling electronics to the BC2 market. 16.0% of his traffic is using IE6.

That's a lot of money to throw away by sending them to an error page.

(it would approx cut his profits in half)

Any legal business using legal software has ie7 offered free of charge as an update

That doesn't mean they've chosen to upgrade.

Steve

 

[KM-Tiger]

Any legal business using legal software has ie7 offered free of charge as an update.

Only if they are using Windows XP or above.

There are still people/businesses using Win2K, or even Win98.

 

[fisicx]

Maybe I'm missing the point here but what's the problem. Build to web standards and just include a hack to cope with the box model problem.

I've never had a problem making a site work in (nearly) all browsers. Use a logical structure and style with CSS and it normally works just fine and dandy.

 

[Idontbuy]

I use IE8 I wish that people would start writing for that more!!
For some reason my xp media edition wont work with ie7 at all.

 

[JElder]

According to my site (fairly ordinary B2B site) we get for IE users:

29% version 6
69% version 7
2% version 8

This is shifting, but there are still significant hits from IE6, primarily businesses (I hope!)

 

[DotNetWebs]

...IE users:

29% version 6
69% version 7
2% version 8

...

Wow that means ALL your visitors are still using IE.

We now have a significant number of users using 'other' browsers but on average our own logs suggest we still have more visitors using IE6 than we do using Firefox, Opera and Safari combined. This means for us it is WAY to early to drop support for IE6 at the moment.

Regards

Dotty

 

[MattyB]

ie6 to access our clients sites, those users are not corporate people.

Corporate or not, if a user has money to spend on your site should you turn them away.

IE6 does suck donkey balls though, and IE7 still manages to make a hash of things.

My little opera mini browser, and wii opera browser renders pages better than they do.

I was listenting to sitepoints podcast today, and they suggest that ie6 now only has a 20% share now. Still high, but at least its dropping.

 

[directmarketingadvice]

Wow that means ALL your visitors are still using IE.

He said "for IE users:"

i.e. it's a breakdown of those using IE.

Steve

 

[capsule01]

As a design agency primarily designing for the web we made the call at the end of last year to stop supporting IE6 in our default browser set. Its 8 years old, very insecure, slow and a pig to develop for.

We see on average 3-4% of total site traffic being IE6, for us that does not warrant spending the extra development time and money on.

 

[DotNetWebs]

He said "for IE users:"

i.e. it's a breakdown of those using IE.

Steve

Thanks for that. I couldn't see the wood for the trees - thought it was a bit odd.

Regards

Dotty

 

[JElder]

Wow that means ALL your visitors are still using IE.

Sorry - just to claify - that was only for users of IE.

Overall site stats are:
IE: 75.2%
Firefox: 20.9%
Safari: 2.5%
Chrome: 0.8%
Opera: 0.3%
Konqueror: 0.15%
Netfront: 0.15%

(slightly rounded!)

 

[ken_uk]

IE Stats on one of my sites (mixed audience, mixed abilities,various countries)

8.0 ----- 1.7%
7.0 ----- 64.72%
6.0 ----- 33.23%
5.5 and below make up the remainder (tiny percentages)

IE Stats on another site, but this one targets mainly non technical females, various countries

8.0 ---- 0.45%
7.0 ---- 80.39%
6.0 ---- 19.17%

 

[YODspica]

my stats, ie6 only 5.8%

MSIE
Msie 7.0

22.4 %

Msie 6.0

5.8 %
Msie 5.0

0 %
Msie 4.0

0.2 %
Msie 3.02

0 %
FIREFOX

Firefox 3.0.5

48.4 %

Firefox 2.0.0.20

1.8 %

Firefox 2.0.0.16

0.1 %
Firefox 2.0.0.14

2.9 %
Firefox 2.0.0.3

0.3 %
Firefox 2.0.0.1

0.1 %
Firefox 1.0

0 %
NETSCAPE
0 % Netscape 5.0

0 %
Others
17.4 %

9 %

Safari

5.3 %

Mozilla

2.8 %

Opera

0.1 %

Links

0 %

 

[ken_uk]

I think there are some hidden images in the last post, that are password protected, you may need to edit them out as it keeps asking for a password when you load the thread...

 

[capsule01]

The last month on one of our sites with a decent stream of traffic and mixed audience.

Internet Explorer 58.74%
Firefox 28.54%
Safari 10.07%
Opera 1.47%
Chrome 0.80%

IE 6 takes 9.3% of total IE traffic

 

[YODspica]

I think there are some hidden images in the last post, that are password protected, you may need to edit them out as it keeps asking for a password when you load the thread...

no problem here, why do want to see hidden images ? .

 

[ken_uk]

"A user name and password are being requested by https://secure.sitesdns.com:2083. The site says: "cPanel""

Is the message box that pops up.

The html source has

<b>MSIE</b> <br />
Msie 7.0<br />
<br />
22.4 %<br />
<img src="https://secure.sitesdns.com:2083/images/awstats/browser/msie.png" border="0" alt="" />Msie 6.0<br />

Im guessing you copy/pasted some stats from your control panel and its protected, your logged in so you wont get the message - we will as we are not logged into your stats...

 

[YODspica]

"
[/code]Im guessing you copy/pasted some stats from your control panel and its protected, your logged in so you wont get the message - we will as we are not logged into your stats...

can't edit the post now, not to worry my password is 30 bits long and would take 2 years for a supercomputer to crack it.

 

[MattyB]

The stats below are for a footy site I built www.whydelilah.co.uk. It gets about 8k users a day, so it's a reasonable spectrum of users.

IE VERSION - %
7.0 - 71.86%
6.0 -27.15%
8.0 - 0.97%
5.5 - 0.01%

 

[creospace]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/19/norway_ie6/

Just a little update on the old IE6 issue - Death to ie6 please!

 

[matt.chatterley]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/19/norway_ie6/

Just a little update on the old IE6 issue - Death to ie6 please!

Hurrah! Is there a UK campaign yet, or do we have to start our own?

 

[MattyB]

Hurrah! Is there a UK campaign yet, or do we have to start our own?

UK Business Forums - could always sponsor the campaign, show there a driving force in business and technology.

Failing that we could copy the recent twitter twestival campaign (bit of a mouth full) to raise awareness for the charity WATER.

stoke.twestival.com/
twestival.com/

Matt
www.adaptive.co.uk
www.number1.co.uk

 

[RussellHenley]

"Any legal business using legal software has ie7 offered free of charge as an update."

Complete horse twaddle. You have to ensure the IT department has has scheduled in and will support that update. I'm writing web-based solutions for the Ministry of Justice at the moment and guess which browser they are all using? IE6.

Large corporates and public sector bodies all use the browser their IT team tells them to. They won't rollout an infrastructure upgrade to a new version without a large amount of regression testing. The GSI runs on IE6 at the moment and is unlikely to change in the near future (some of them only recently got XP...).

Anyone with an awareness of ITIL should understand that you don't just upgrade to the new version willy nilly - you need to make sure your line of business applications work in the new browser, which can be a long and expensive process so some companies just don't do it for every version.

So you are stuck with IE6 for a while.




Russell.

 

[DotNetWebs]

...Large corporates and public sector bodies all use the browser their IT team tells them to...

...So you are stuck with IE6 for a while...

Russell.

I agree. I made these points earlier in this thread.

Regards

Dotty

 

[MattyB]

Bit shocked to hear of major corps and government organisations running an app that's one big security hole, sounds like fun. On that argument alone why aren't you upgrading.

Is the really issue that your intranets won't work on anything other than IE6? If that's the case there are steps you can take to make your code compliant.

Sounds to me like someone is a little scared of meeting the future.

I hope IE6 provides you with a little comfort blanket of love and hope, for the rest of us it's a grubby little botched effort from microsoft that we've been saddled with for far too long.

Thanks for holding us back.

 

[bobgentry]

Just checked my stats and I have 21% of IE users on 6.0 and 77% on IE 7.0

 

[MattyB]

Just checked my stats and I have 21% of IE users on 6.0 and 77% on IE 7.0

It takes me back 1998 when I built a website for a customer, and went up to his place to show him what we'd built.

He said - it looks SHIP[self edit], I can't see it all on the page, and the colours look rubbish.

I'd only built the site using a colour pallet of 256 colours and for a screen resolution of 800x600 rather than his 16 colour screen, 640 x 480 screen display.