

Is It Time to Ditch IE6? - sitepoint
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/08/25/is-it-time-to-ditch-ie6/
IE6 turns 7 years old this week. Its successor is almost two years old, and IE8 is on the horizon. So why do so many web sites still support it? Why do so many people still use it? And is it time we said, "Enough is enough," and dropped support for it completely?
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pmsaue0
How militant some developers have become about ditching ie6 doesn't really
make sense. It decision seems pretty clear: if you are a site for techy users
you don't need to bend over backwards to support it, and you can probably drop
it; if you are a general-use site or site that plans on having 30+ year-olds
you better have some support for it or you're taking a 25-30% hit.

We tell our ie6 users one time (at registration) that their browser is not up
to date and that they should upgrade to ff or ie7 to take advantage of all of
our features. I've seen this solution that looks nice and unobtrusive:
<http://www.pushuptheweb.com/>

I asked my girlfriend a few months ago why she never upgraded ANYTHING on her
computer, ie6 included, and she said she only wanted to check her email and
buy things, and that installing updates always took more time than she wanted
to spend in the first place, and that she wasn't sure which updates to trust.
Many people can't upgrade their browsers, many people don't care to, many
people don't know why they should.

oh well. that's the world of warcraft that you play :)

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sh1mmer
Yahoo uses the Graded Browser Support policy
(<http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/>) for a reason. It's because we
check what % of our users use each browser and support the appropriate ones.

You can bet that if Yahoo is still choosing to support IE6 it's because a
decent slice of the internet still uses it. That said, IE <6 is on our C-grade
list. This means we actively block them from getting JS/CSS and display a
"nag" message with upgrade information.

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marijn
Just treat it like Netscape 4 or Lynx or whatever -- try to display
_something_ meaningful, but don't bother about getting all the details to work
entirely right.

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gigawatt
Exactly. Many people aren't choosing to still use IE6 - the choice is being
made for them. I work onsite in a non-profit sometimes, and they are all still
on IE6 until the IT dept decides it's safe/worth it to upgrade. (EDIT: And I
do my part to convince them it is safe and worth it.)

I feel like every month or so, a big site says "Death to IE6," then people
point out that it's not always an individual decision to upgrade, then someone
like marijn points out the most reasonable solution. Make sure the content
comes through, make sure it doesn't look completely ridiculous, and educate
clients as you go. And if you're lucky, like 37signals, you can decide for
your clients. We'll get there eventually.

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geuis
I am one of two front-end engineers at a major site with 10 million members.
We're having this discussion internally. From our side we want to stop because
80% of our time is actually spent on making things work for IE6. It's a huge
number. 80% of my salary is being spent on less than 30% of our audience. 78%
of our total traffic is IE, with 66% of that being ie7 and the remaining being
34% ie6.

The biggest hurdle we face is that we aren't a small company. We can't make
smart decisions like adding upgrade prompts because marketing would throw a
fit.

The approach right now we are taking is to get data. Microsoft ends support
for IE6 in July 2010 when support for WinXP SP3 ends. After reading about the
blogger who found only 2% of his ie6 visits were real, I am now looking into
that for us. On our projects, I am keeping track of how much time is spent on
supporting it versus ie7, ff, and safari. What it boils down to is that we
will only be able to drop support when we can prove it costs us more than we
make from ad clickthroughs from ie6 users.

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josefresco
What you you building that requires you spend 80% of your time fixing for IE6?
I can't even imagine.

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geuis
First, 80% is an off the cuff comment/estimate. Obviously its not that high,
but it is still very high. I had meant to say 'feels like 80%'.

When you work for a large company and the major decisions on visual design are
made by other people, you have little control over how it looks or behaves,
and only the freedom to code. Unfortunately, this breeds an atmosphere where
people with little concept of the _difficulties_ of implementing cross-browser
designs are the ones expecting and demanding that they work in IE6 and "it
should look like the picture from the design team."

So yes, a site or feature that takes me hours or a day to code up and be
proper in FF, Safari, and IE7 usually adds up to 4x the same amount of time to
make it work in IE6. Not always, but often enough that it has become an issue.

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sown
YES

