Hi,
I'm trying to make a pitch to my boss to drop support for IE 6. I find that a disproportionate amount of time is spent on trying to make the css IE 6 compatible and that could be spend on making new features or improving usability etc.
Do you plan to do so on your future projects and if so how did you convince others to support only newer browsers?
No.
BUT it always depends on your target visitors. You might want to look at the analytics data of your previous projects to see which browsers your visitors are using. If a huge percentage of your target visitors are using IE6, then it's to you and their benefit that you make your sites IE6 compatible.
Some 15-20% of people who surf net still use IE6. If your company can live with that fact and have a way on convincing all of your site users to upgrade to IE8 or even use Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera, then that would be better.
Microsoft will stop support on IE6 by 2014! Hooray!
If it's a paying gig, tell them you'll charge more unless it's an assumption going into the project. That's the only way it's worked out for us so far. I'm all for backwards compatibility but the amount of money wasted on supporting IE6 for most websites/applications is just ridiculous.
Like it or not, IE6 is here to stay for a good while yet.
The best you can do is use frameworks and libraries (like jQuery) that make life easier for you.
Recently we got permission NOT to support IE6. Mostly because of IE6NoMore campaign.
I believe that it makes website only better - many people knows what kind of harm IE6 does and admires such a step.
How to convince your boss?
1) User browser stats
2) cost of hacking work minus profits from supporting the few users
Money is the thing, make him do the math.
Yes, I do, because I use IE6 (edit: I use it in lieu of other IE's, I browse exclusively with firefox and opera, but sometimes I need IE). I'm a bit tired of people complaining about it; I mean welcome to the world of development.
And to be perfectly honest, a lot of people blame their own incompetency at developing in CSS and JavaScript, and lack of research into what they are seeing, and so on on IE, when they are at fault, for not following proper development processes.
There are some general bugs that need to be worked around, but in general the so-called 'problem' is very over-blown.
Yes I do support it, and I find it pretty easy, using frameworks to help me (jQuery, reset css, etc, simple downgrading of functionality).
IE is tied the the operating system and since support of XP (IE6) is coming to an end i would say No.
Vista/Win7 will be running later versions of IE. But it will take some time for people/companies to upgrade.
When developing sites for clients, I absolutely support IE6. Unless I get the explicit permission to skip it; and guess what, that hasn't happened yet. In that case I restrain myself from using techniques that I know won't work in IE6. There's always another way to do things, even if it's slightly less pretty.
When toying around with my own stuff that I'm not planning on making any money with, I explicitly give myself the permission to skip IE6 to be able to try some new, fancy stuff. I try to have it at least degrade gracefully though.
Is this overall frustrating and not much fun? Sure. Live with it.
You can't just decide on a whim to drop support for a major browser, unless practically nobody in your audience uses it. If you have hard data that regularly only two of your visitors every month use IE6, you can consider dropping support for it. But as long as significant number of your visitors use it, and even 1% is quite significant, you'd only harm yourself.
The rule for talking to business people is always: sell your idea in terms of profit. In this case, how much money do you make off of customers using IE6, and how much money does it cost you to support IE6? In many cases you're losing money by supporting IE6. In other cases, you are making money, but if you forced your user base to switch to IE7+ or a real browser, some of your users would leave but enough would stay that you would be making more money. And in some cases, you can complain about it, but the best decision is to still support IE6 because it's still the most profitable course.
We develop web applications for a customer that has a policy to run IE6. I don't understand that, because IE6 has still got security flaws that makes it safer to upgrade to a newer version. I have actually seen official statements by the norwegian government that instructs IT sections in the different departments to upgrade to IE7 because of this. But since our customer have a different policy, my hands are tied...
Get your hands on some user statistics for each individual website you're going to work on. Get the browser usage statistics from the past year, not more, no less. If there is still a significant amount of IE6 users (I personally go for more than 5%) it is probably worth supporting IE6.
If it's less than whatever you deem a reasonable percentage of users, so in my example: less than 5%, you could simply use this fact to try and convince your boss.. and ultimately.. your client.
Further arguments you can use are: Better use of CSS selectors, better support for PNG images without hacks and making the world a better place.
Unfortunately though, IE6 is here to stay.. not because the users are nefarious bastards, but simply because some companies take way too much time to upgrade their software.
One of the problems with ignoring IE6 is that a lot of business users are still running it becuase either they don't know how to upgrade or they are not allowed to upgrade because of the IT security policy.
So if your these people also are the ones that actually pay you, you have a problem with ignoring IE6, as it will upset your paying customers. I used to work at a company where we had an online job board, and the income would come from the companies posting the jobs. But at the fall of 2008, we still had 25% of the users running IE6.
With that said, I'm not going to support IE6 on a new project that I'm working on, despite the fact that it will have companies as paying customers. We hope that by the time that we launch, IE6 will mostly be eliminated)
Btw, the solution we created at our job board had a normal clean, standards compliant CSS sheet, and then one with IE6 CSS hacks. If the browser was detected to be IE6, a CSS reference would be added to the style sheet containing hacks, a long with a reference to a javascript for implementing transparant PNGs.
Support it? Yes. With full design? Never.
Progressive enhancement is the way to go, and IE6 is so far behind any curve that it's not worth putting all your time into pixel-perfect design. But you still want your content accessible to everyone.
Andy Clarke offers a brilliant analysis and solution here:
http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/universal%5Finternet%5Fexplorer%5F6%5Fcss/
No. I would rather spend years implementing my own rendering engine and creating my own webbrowser than have to worry about IE 6 again.