It needs a lot of work to make the webpages render correctly in IE6.
Other browsers (like FF, Safari) are fine because they usually follow the W3C standard better. Even IE7 is better than IE6 (although its acid 3 test score is only 14/100).
I would like to know how many people still care about IE6 when developing webpages. If you still work hard to deal with IE6, what is the right time you think you can get rid of it?
I have to :( Some customers are still using IE6 as a company-policy, and the pages must look good for them.
We have a tool that allows the user to create pages using a Web editor, and you have no idea how much of workaround code we must write to support that old browser :/
I generally stop supporting a version of a browser once it is two versions old. However, you should think about the audience you're writing web pages for. A lot of governments are typically slow to make changes to their browser versions, so they might need IE6. A customer can override any decision you make about browser compatibility as well.
We have to because our client uses IE6 internally. Since they pay us millions of dollars per year, we pretty much have to do what they say. We can't force them to upgrade. We certainly wish we could since we spend tons of time making our pages work on IE6 as well as IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Chrome, Safari 2 & Safari 3. 18% of the visitors to our website use IE6.
Two questions:
1. Are your customers using IE6?
2. Are they PAYING customers?
As a safety net (no pun intended) I would, just because a lot of the people that I work with still use IE6 or maybe even earlier. As a place with a lot older machines (and older folks) there are still using IE6 religiously (I work at a college campus). The last thing we want to hear here is that something doesn't work on their website and isn't compatible, etc.
Absolutely not. IE7 has been around long enough for IT departments to make the upgrade. Anyone not upgrading at this point is just lazy, or fears Microsoft way too much.
IE6 is absolute garbage compared to the latest browsers such as Chrome, Safari and even IE8.
I would recommend that devs detect IE6 and then tell people to upgrade, as this antiquated browser is no longer supported.
For my personal project I focus on FF/Opera/Safari/IE8. I just check that pages stay usable in IE7. As for IE6, I haven't seen it for ages and don't know where to test with it even if I wanted to.
Software that I develop at work was originally targeted at IE. Result: it was able to work in FF after some third-party components were updated, but it is totally screwed in Opera/Safari.
Develop first for the good browsers, then see if you can fix for the bad ones.
I do, though it pains me. I develop web applications for my hospital and every workstation still uses IE6. Many of our vendors have yet to move to support IE7 (or anything else).
It certainly requires some consideration when developing, IE6 should at the very least be able to display the content in a usable form.
It's all about your users though, if IE6 counts for a large majority then sure you should make it look good, but there is little point in wasting time hacking css if they only count for 1% or so.
I guess it depends on your audience. If you website is a general public site, then you should strive to support IE6 as best you can.
One of our websites, which gets monthly uniques in the millions range shows the following browser stats:
Browser
Visits
% visits
Internet Explorer
x,xxx,xxx 67.56%
Firefox
3xx,xxx 21.10%
Safari
xxx,xxx 8.67%
Chrome
xx,xxx 1.65%
Mozilla
x,xxx 0.37%
Out of which Internet Explorer accounts for:
Browser Version
Visits
Browser Version contribution to total:
1.
7.0
xxx,xxx 60.19%
2.
6.0
3xx,xxx 26.00%
3.
8.0
1xx,xxx 13.78%
So, for this specific website, IE6 still beats Firefox by a slim margin IE6 is very close to Firefox in regards to total number of visitors, so it needs to be supported.
I would be curious to see StackOverflow's browser stats. I believe that if your visitors are more technical, you'll likely see much smaller numbers of IE6 visitors (or any IE version for that matter).
It all depends on your target audience.
For example, if your web site contains information for linux developers, you can more or less forget about IE6, not worth developing for it. However, if you are developing a e-shop of gardening goods, chances are the visitors will just use whatever browser their PC (and those PCs might be outdated) has installed, and making sure it all works on IE6 would be a good idea.
There is another thing to consider - if the (paying) customer says he wants it to work on IE6, it must work on IE6.
I haven't cared about IE6 in a long, long time. But as long as the IE6 browser percentage of visiting users to our sites (millions of hits per day) remains in the double digits, the site has to work in IE6.
If you are finding it too much work to support IE6, you could always show a message indicating they need to upgrade. Not recommended for a site that already supports IE6. But for a time Facebook did not support IE6 after their November 08 upgrade. They displayed a message to upgrade.
My company's policy is to support the current and previous major version of IE. Therefore, this is now IE 7 and 8, so we don't have to support IE6 any more.
Unfortunately, now we need to support IE 8, which is still not very impressive.
After reading a blog post by Peter-Paul Koch I am seriously considering making IE6 compatibility a premium option on my development services. It is interesting to see the stats showing how most IE6 use is during office hours.
No. My compagny have stop using HTML as presentation layer for web application. We use flex, or occasionally silverlight.
EDIT : I see several time the "and if the custumer want to pay for it". It's not working like that for us. We selling software, our software run in Flash/silverlight runtime. So if the buyer want it's software to run, he have to install the runtime.
It's the same thing with java. For running a java app, you have to install the JVM.
As well as the good answers regarding target audience and business factors there's another question that perhaps needs answering - what do you actually mean by support?
Does support mean that the website will look the same in IE6 as it does in modern browsers? Or does it mean that there may be consistencies within the design and layout of the website but the functionality remains identical? Perhaps not supporting the website means blocking anyone from viewing the website that is using IE6?
There is an excellent post on this by Jeremy Keith called the the IE6 Equation where he states:
Each end of that scale is extreme. I don’t think that anybody should be actively blocking any browser but neither do I think that users of an outdated browser should get exactly the same experience as users of a more modern browser. The real meanings of "supporting" or "not supporting" IE6 lie somewhere in-between those extremes.
A lot of developers/designers are following the Yahoo graded Browser Support which is well worth a read. The Yahoo Graded Browser support defines ie6 as requiring A-grade support. This covers topic such as progressive enhancement and graceful degradation which may be of interest.
So yes I personally do support IE6 so that I never turn anyone away from accessing my content but at what level - it depends.