
Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade - ajbatac
http://www.usabilitypost.com/post/14-drop-ie6-support-give-people-a-reason-to-upgrade
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timae
I have a feeling that the majority of IE6 use takes place from work computers
where employees don't have control over which browser is used.
Therefore........ this won't work.

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gabrielroth
Well, the same argument applies with regard to work computers. If enough sites
are broken in IE6 -- especially work-related sites and web apps, not just
time-wasting sites -- then corporate IT departments will have to upgrade.

That said, the strategy outlined in the article runs into the collective
action problem: if every web developer in the world stopped supporting IE6 at
the same time, all web developers would benefit. But individual web developers
have an incentive to keep supporting IE6, keep their user base happy, and
free-ride on the sacrifices of other sites that drop IE6 support. So it's hard
for an initiative like this one to gain much ground.

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raganwald
My colleagues and I have discussed this at length. One aspect of dropping IE
support that "piques our intellectual curiosity" is thinking of it as game
theory. It mightily resembles one of the four games centered on Prisoner's
Dilemma (along with Moose Hunt, Chicken, and one other that eludes my
recollection).

If some critical mass of vendors/web sites/providers drops IE support, we all
win. But if we don't get critical mass, those that drop it lose business to
those that maintain support for it.

~~~
SapphireSun
I like your game theory interpretation, but I think that there are subtle
differences that rule out using the prisoner's dilemma as a model. A really
good strategy in the prisoner's dilemma is Tit-for-Tat. So the logic goes that
if your competitor drops IE6 support then you should too. But here's the
trick. Since you may have multiple competitors and (I think I'm right about
this) only one iteration of play, there's no really good strategy to follow;
so it's not really quite the prisoner's dilemma.

Most importantly, unlike the prisoners' dilemma, you can communicate with your
competitors. Perhaps what you can do is collude with them to drop the support
simultaneously since it would save you both money and aggravation. You might
want to keep a backup site that does have support enabled in case they don't
all hold up to their promise so that you don't get burned. I don't imagine
that anyone would agree to a contract on something like this, so plan B is
essential.

~~~
raganwald
PD is not the only game in the family, there are four games that differ in the
relationship between the payoffs. Which game it might resemble depends on how
you evaluate the payoff matrix.

For example, in "Chicken," coöperating means turning aside and defecting means
driving straight. The payoff is very big for the person who defects while the
other player coöperates, but there is a big penalty if both players defect
simultaneously. Same game mechanics, different payoff table.

But all of the games have the property of having two basic choices: coöperate
and defect. In this case, coöperating is dropping IE support and defecting is
maintaining IE support.

Of course, these are n-player games and the matrixes are more complex because
the payoffs depend on how many "players" defect.

I don't think communication matters for these games. It's always explained
that you can't communicate, but teh really essential deal here is that you
have to make your decisions simultaneously, no player sees the other player's
decisions before making their own decision.

In that respect, real life is different: there can be early stage players like
37 signals that get "opinionated" and laggards can watch what they do before
deciding.

~~~
eru
And you have to differentiate communication between cheap talk and
commitments. Both are very different abilities.

Anyway, I like seeing someone use diacritic marks.

~~~
raganwald
Thanks. Most diacritics in English are on loanwords, but I like using the
diacresis to disambiguate long vowels. A particularly esoteric one is Oölogy,
the study of eggs :-)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_diac...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_diacritics)

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staunch
Just get my competitors to do it first.

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wmeredith
www.pushuptheweb.com

"A subtle upgrade link is shown when people visit your website using an
outdated browser. They can click this link to visit the upgrade website for
that browser, or choose to be reminded after a time you specify."

I have this installed on several personal sites and a few business sites. It's
classy and unobtrusive. Highly recommended.

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jdavid
Apple did it, so doesn't it mean its the right thing to do? (ok so a little
sarcasim here, but look at the logic of it)

Mac OSX no longer comes with IE baked in.

Apple also forced all of its software vendors and customers to pretty much
upgrade. There is something to be said for the forest fire approach.

Come on, let IE crash and burn. Lets teach users to keep their browser upto
date, its really the best thing for the ecosystem as a whole.

If a user ends up having a problem with a 7 year old browser they will ask
their tech friend what is wrong, and they will say UPGRADE.

If that is not enough, you can monitize your app through IE users upgrading to
firefox <http://www.explorerdestroyer.com/>
[https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...</a>

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jotto
Facebook's new version drops IE6 support. If they maintain this, it will force
a lot of people to upgrade.

~~~
wulie
I've heard the office division at Microsoft is likely to drop IE6 support for
the next version of SharePoint as well, which would be a big deal here.

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jmtulloss
I don't support IE 6 in any project I do and don't plan on it. If anything I
do gets big enough that it makes business sense to support it, I'll just
outsource the work. IE6 is a monster that is not worth my time.

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ivankirigin
Idea: a widget that loads only when IE6 is detected, going to a page where you
can upgrade. Sites that want to support this movement can add it to the bottom
of the page.

~~~
whatusername
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=296255>

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lux
Why don't we just get more people to join a movement giving a cut-off date,
like <http://iedeathmarch.org/> ? If enough people get behind it, it could get
the media attention needed to make it a realizable movement.

The PHP community did this with PHP4 -> PHP5. Giving notice of a future date
also allows companies to plan ahead, creating more credibility in the movement
as well.

~~~
josefresco
From the home page: "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"

All aboard the fail-boat! March 2009-ish should be a specific date, with some
sort of counter to give people a sense of finality and impending doom.

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greyman
But there are a lot of inexperienced computer users, who just don't know how
to upgrade any software. I think most of them use IE6. If those people will
see your site is broken, they will just not visit it - they will not even know
the reason is their browser.

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Kilimanjaro
If by "upgrade" you mean switching to Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome then I
am in.

I could care less for a company that has shown no respect for web developers
and internet users at all.

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pmsaue0
[http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com+ie6)
HN discussions regarding ie6

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mattmaroon
AKA cut off your nose to spite your face.

