
Does IE6 *Still* Matter? - nreece
http://advice.cio.com/esther_schindler/does_ie6_still_matter
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sh1mmer
I'm sick of seeming posts like this. No one else can tell you if IE matters to
your site. You (I hope) have statistics on who uses your site you can see if a
significant part of your community uses IE6. If it's less than 10% maybe you
could consider running an upgrade message, if it isn't suck it up.

Posts like this that try to generalise the web together are nonsense. They can
suggest trends, but then Yahoo still supports IE6 and they have a pretty large
% of the web using Yahoo.com.

Mostly it seems like a bunch of people moaning because Web development is
hard. That's true. IE6 does not make me happy, that's not an excuse to shaft
users. If CIO magazine can give CIOs a compelling reason to upgrade all their
legacy machines, now that is something I'd like to read about.

~~~
teej
> "IE6 does not make me happy, that's not an excuse to shaft users."

Sure it is. It's called ROI and the ROI for supporting IE6 is terrible. You
could easily spend your time supporting IE6 and instead spend it on usability
tests to better support different user demographics. Users are more than
browsers.

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nuclear_eclipse
As a developer of an open source bugtracker [1], I'd say without hesitation
that IE6, to the pain of my fingers and eyeballs, does still matter. I can't
tell you how much pain and frustration I'm going through right now trying to
make even stupid things work across all browsers, and it seems every time I
think I've fixed something, a swarm of IE6 users creep out of the woodwork and
tell me just how wrong I am....

/me cries

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mlLK
This question discomforts me coming from somewhere like 'cio'.com. To
reiterate what I know most will say, IE6 still holds 1/5th of the browser
share.

<http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>

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brentb
Sadly, yes, unless your site is aimed solely at technologically savvy users.
Or even technologically awake users.

Sad as it is, most sources indicate that IE still has 70-75% of the browser
market share overall, and ~40% of IE users are still on IE6. So roughly 30% of
the web browsing market is on IE6, which is a rather large subset to simply
ignore.

Like it or not (and none of us do), the bulk of sites out there are stuck with
supporting IE6 for the near future.

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Harkins
At the Washington Post we have a lot of visitors from corporate/government
environments that have locked-down machines that still run IE6, so we see it
more than the web average (sorry, can't be more specific). I love the graph of
browsers over time, though, you can spot weekends because IE6 usage plummets
and IE7/FF/Saf usage all jump.

We put together some special homepage layouts to display as election results
started coming in. IE6 hated one of them (the expanding box bug) -- the main
developer spent around 8h struggling with it and two of us joined into to help
around midnight Monday. Took us another 90m to get it working cross-browser.
In other words, I can't wait for IE6 to die.

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edw519
_About 25% of Internet users run IE6, representing more than all Firefox
versions (assuming you trust anyone's Web browser statistics)... well, that's
not small change._

Does IE6 _Still_ Matter?

For a hobby, it's up to you.

For a business, only if you want to remain a business.

~~~
JulianMorrison
I'd say hobbyists have a positive moral obligation to do what commerce can't:
break the web so badly for IE6 that even the most teeth-gritted Luddite
finally gives up and upgrades.

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pistoriusp
I think the answer is yes, but I've also seen some companies dropping support
for IE6.

That been said I was fortunate enough to be able to release a website that was
functional in IE6. But didn't include the "fancy" effects and opaque
backgrounds that the other browsers supported.

And my startup's administrative interface which is used by my clients doesn't
support IE6 whilst the front end for the end-users does.

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vaksel
honestly I think at this point this is a mutual bad relationship. Websites
adapt themselves to IE6 because thats what corporate types use. And corporate
types don't upgrade, because they have no reason to do so, since websites can
be run with IE6.

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speek
For one of my blogs, we got fed up with IE6 compatibility... so we just made a
little javascript that would forward users of IE6 to a page with screenshots
of our site and a little "Dude, upgrade your browser."

This was for a corporate blog, mind you.

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lionhearted
Tech late adopters are often better sources of revenue for ecommerce sites -
they have more disposal income, pirate less, etc. "Let the unwashed masses
suffer for their ignorance" loses a lot of business if your goal is to sell
something.

~~~
nailer
> Tech late adopters are often better sources of revenue for ecommerce sites -
> they have more disposal income, pirate less, etc.

I'd think early adopters have more disposable income. Those gadgets don't come
cheap you know. iPods were $AU800 when I first got one.

Also, tech late adopters may have greater trust issues with buying items over
the internet, particularly from companies they haven't heard of.

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pstinnett
unfortunately..yes.

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gopher
yes.

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MoeDrippins
The presumption was that it ever did. Popular at one time, sure, but "matter"?

