How do you handle very old browsers on your site?

Question

Hi. We have a non-profit web site that got about 5 million hits in May. Of those, about 5,700 were from IE 5.x or lower; about 4,000 were from folks with Netscape 4.x or lower. We know that the current site's layout works for newer browsers and we're testing it on IE6 as well (along with Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Firefox). How do you handle the folks with the older browsers? Because of jQuery libraries and such, the pages might not function correctly on those old browsers.

Is there an easy way to show a text-only version on browsers that can't handle the CSS and jQuery goodies? How do large sites handle this sort of thing? I've used the @embed to hide the stylesheet from Netscape 4.x, but not sure beyond that.

Answer 1

You should not keep the old browsers as your main priority - just keep the content readable on them, and maybe add a helpful banner that explains they are using an outdated browser.

However, you don't have to focus on getting the layout look 100% same on browsers that old, that's just waste of time. As long as the content is available and they can navigate the site, it should be fine.

Answer 2

If you use tableless / css based design techniques then you can easily fall back to text only.

You could use conditional comments to only include css files in certain version of internet explorer.

You could use jquery version checking to only execute it on the versions you want to.

Something else I just thought is that you could show a message to older browsers like I have seen around the web urging the user to upgrade for compatibility and most importantly SECURITY. (I think twitter is doing this now).

And another thought - if you are going back to browsers that old you are probably going to have to worry about screen size as most sites as designed to fit 1024 x 768 minimum these days but at once point 800x600 was the entry level...

Answer 3

Make sure that all content is accessible and readable from a browser like Lynx, and no content requires Javascript to read & access.

I would suggest designing for disability accessibility and seeing if that would produce those results as well - kill two birds with one arrow.

Answer 4

Here is what Big G has to say about it :)

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers-for-modern-applications.html

They are going to stop supporting IE6...