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Should we support IE6 anymore?
There is a lot of talk about stopping to support IE6 and websites such as www.browsesad.com provide tools to educate your visitors about their poor choice of browser.
The browser is 9 years old and is personally an absolute bane to support for limited rewards.
Why exactly should we still support it?
Simply because IE6 still represents 27.21% of the web's population as of July 2009.
Now I know some of you will probably tell me that if more and more sites stop supporting IE6, the browser will eventually disappear. That's a lie.
Picture this:
Corporation ACME has over 150 000 computers all running Windows 2000/XP. They also have a nice intranet site developed 7 years ago which works in IE6 quite well, but not so much in other browsers.
Do you really think they are going to invest money into fixing their intranet application when they control their complete IT infrastructure and who gets what updates? It's less costly to just postpone the update until they migrate to a new system.
A lot of corporations are in that situation.
Here is another example:
Business FooBar sells its products on the Internet. A little more than a quarter of their traffic is coming from IE6, which also means a quarter of their sales.
Do you think FooBar will simply block off those customers or annoy them with a huge notice telling them they are using a buggy browser? That would cost them nearly a quarter of their sales! As long as there is monetary value to supporting IE6 (and it does and will till its market share drops below about 8%), IE6 will prevail, which is also why Google won't be phasing out support for IE6 anytime soon.
Campaigns such as Browse Sad do not understand the mentality of the corporate culture (change is costly) and do not understand that in the end, consumers have a negligible impact on the worldwide IT ecosystem. The big corporations control it.
Consumers do have a growing impact but it is still insignificant compared to the impact corporations have.
And let's be truthful here: everyone who has the technical expertise and who could upgrade to a better browser already did. The rest are people still running outdated OSes, don't know how to upgrade, or don't have admin rights on their machine.
The number one reason you still support it is because the client needs you to.
The number one reason the client needs you to is because they are a giant corporation with strict IT rollout policies and haven't updated their desktop browser policy due to security concerns.
I have some corporate customers and their software upgrade policy doesn't allow users to upgrade to newer IE until there is global action to do so. Have to wait until their IT Dept. decides to prepare mass upgrade (the IE or the whole OS).
people are still using IE6
They use a company computer and have no control over upgrades
They’ve popped into an Internet cafe and have to use what’s available
It works for them so why change
They don’t realise there are other browsers available
mmm They like it??
“Without IE6, a 40 hour web design project might only be a 30 hour web design project. Please don't put me out of work in this economy.” Joel Davis , Yellow Button
Internet explorer6 still enjoys significant usage:
Check a few of these links:
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
From a corporate perspective, sometimes its a big decision to upgrade to a later version of IE - the use of an internal bespoke web client being one reason. My company still uses IE6, however I think there is talk of moving to 8, howver there is still much testing that would be involved before we could.
Because on most of the XP operating systems it's still supported by Microsoft until 13-July-2010...
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifesupsps/#Internet_Explorer