

Defending IE6 - kingshaun
http://coda.co.za/blog/2009/04/01/defending-ie6
Damien du Toit makes an excellent case for continued support of IE6 and examines a methodology for doing so.
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mattmaroon
The problem he's missing is simple math. We're a small startup making apps for
social networks, and about 7% of our customers use IE6. (I keep meaning to
check by revenue, I bet it's less then, since presumably a lot of them are
using it at work where they can't just whip out their credit card.)
Unfortunately, getting our great UI to work in IE6 takes up some percentage of
our time. As time goes on, the percentage of users drops and the percentage of
our time increases. I'm not sure if they've crossed paths yet, but if not,
it's close.

Sure, if you have unlimited resources, develop for IE6, Opera, whatever else.
But when you're on a budget, and you have to choose between making your app
20% better for 93% of your users, or making it work for the extra 7%, it's not
a no-brainer.

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carlosrr
He is not advocating that you get your great UI to work on IE6. He is
advocating that you get a lame UI just for IE6 users.

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moe
Which takes nearly as much, if not even more effort.

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intranation
It really doesn't. I'm an experienced front-end coder, and I can tell you
right now that the amount of extra work I put into IE6 support is really not
prohibitively high. The bugs and issues in IE6 are well-known and well-
documented, so it's a simple matter of professionalism to be aware of these
things, and account for them, as you code.

~~~
moe
Depends on what your frontend looks like. The average run-off-the-mill HTML
site can ofcourse be made to work in all browsers with little effort. The real
pain starts when you want to do interesting stuff. Advanced AJAX and
javascript magic just doesn't work in IE6 without horrible overhead - partly
due to the lack of sensible debugging tools.

~~~
intranation
Or... you could just use a Javascript framework that takes care of that
abstraction for you. This is seriously not a hard problem.

~~~
moe
Well, frameworks go a long way but they don't help with the pains in the CSS
area. When supporting IE6 you're generally limiting yourself to the
capabilities of that browser. And for any non-trivial site you _will_ run into
hard problems regularly, unless you're leaving HTML behind entirely (ExtJS,
Flash).

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mr_justin
If we're talking about designer blogs or minor sites/apps that do not involve
a great amount of development, then I absolutely agree with the author.

BUT if we're talking about large web applications that have serious
development costs for every "supported" web browser, then his argument breaks
down quickly. These costs come in the form of feature development, bug fixing
and in customer support for released features. When a single web browser
consumes the majority of these costs, yet the browser is continually falling
lower and lower in usage, then it's time to put serious thought in dropping
support for that browser.

~~~
Jem
I'm the only developer for a company that has created (and continues to
support) some huge sites that require(d) a great amount of development. For
the majority of these sites, IE6 is not falling in usage. It has hit - and
stuck at - around 30%. Alienating 30% of a client's potential customers is
just not an option.

~~~
moe
That sounds painful - and interesting.

Do you happen to know what kind of userbase that is?

Since IE7 is pushed pretty aggressively by windows update I would think there
must be a few large corporations in there who have rejected the update thus
far?

At least I _want_ to think that because IE6 being stuck at 30% gives me the
shivers. On our sites IE6 has been constantly dropping since about December
and is now at around 18%. That's still too much but at least the tendency is
right here...

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Jem
I can't be too specific but one site in particular that I maintain has a big
user base in education (from nurseries to universities) and I think it's very
likely that this heavily influences the IE stats.

I know from experience (I've worked as tech support in schools and a college)
that these establishments are normally the very last to push out upgrades to
things like browsers. There's a big "if it works, don't touch it" attitude.

~~~
ankhmoop
Which implies that if a sufficient number of web sites cease to work with IE6,
such sites will "touch it"?

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Jem
Not really. Your average IT admin in a school isn't going to care that the
students can't get to latestweb2gadget.com

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verdant
There are simply so many browsers and devices being used today, it is hard
(impossible?) for a site, particularly a small startup, to support everything.
I think its important to figure out who your target is. Do I need support on
cell phone browsers? What types of interactions do I need with my users? What
groups will be my "bread and butter" so to speak? If I'm selling Macintosh
accessories, perhaps I don't need to support IE6.

I think you have to make some decisions about what you want to support. I
really don't think complaining to your users about the browser they have
chosen helps. If anything, it drives them away. I do think that no matter what
you choose, you should always give your users back something. You may not be
able to support all browsers, but don't return a page that simply doesn't work
and leaves the user wondering why. This may be easier said than done, but I
think its a good middle ground between the complexities of trying to support
everything and alienating users by only supporting your "chosen path"

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briansmith
What features of IE7 are difficult or impossible to emulate in IE6? In my
experience, getting sites working with IE6 is really easy. There are _very_
few things that IE7 can do that IE6 cannot. (It is funny that this argument is
usually only made to disparage IE7 but never to support IE6.) To support IE7
you've already given up border-radius, display: table, automatic PNG
transparency, SVG, a lot of the DOM, and a lot of the other things that make
developing for other browsers so easy. With IE6, you can get a lot of the
functionality of IE7 with just a little Javascript (already written for you by
others), a few conditional comments, and a little extra CSS. You might have
performance issues with adding all these workarounds, but workiing with poor
performance is usually better than not working at all.

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budwin
I'm not sure exactly why there's so much controversy here.

The customers of your website should always come first, and if they use IE6,
support IE6. Making them upgrade is a surefire way to alienate them or
encourage them to go somewhere else. (not to mention, if you already support
IE7, supporting IE6 is not that big of a stretch)

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ilaksh
If you have are a lot of IE 6 customers, it may just be impossible to try to
force them to switch browsers without losing a lot of customers. Not sure we
really need anyone to explain that.

However, this post seems to go beyond that and basically be quite passionately
explaining ways that we can happily accept and just deal with the multitudes
of browser incompatibilities and inabilities. Probably, this guy makes his
living off of these problems.

This person's attitude is absolutely sickening to me. The situation with
browser incompatibilities and deficiencies is out of control. Action must be
taken.

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kenver
I wonder if putting another browser on a CD and putting it in with a customers
purchase would make any impact on the percentage of IE6 browsers visiting that
site in the future. It could be a worthwhile investment if IE6 support could
be dropped sooner.

For example if a business has many users that are on IE6, but the company put
a firefox cd in the box of every order, would the number of users on that
website using IE6 drop at substantially faster rate than if they didn't?

~~~
Jem
I used to get lots of AOL CDs back in the day. It didn't make me in any way
tempted to go with AOL.

~~~
kenver
Some people must have though, or they would have stopped, and I wouldn't have
collected a lifetimes supply of coasters.

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Hexstream
"you shouldn't even maintain a list of supported browsers in the first place."

Does "any reasonably standards-compliant browser" count as a list of supported
browsers?

