It's time to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6, surely?
I wrote this post a while back. The content can still be relevant but the information I've linked to may not be available.
Just now, I fired up an old Windows 98 PC to look at a recent website amendment in Internet Explorer 6. That means using a PC that is approximately eight years old to view my website in a browser of a similar age. How ridiculous is that?! Whilst there are other ways of testing IE 6 without using an old PC like this [for example, Adobe Browser Lab and Litmus], I think it's time to stop supporting the old dinosaur that is IE 6. Yes, I know that perhaps 20% of users on some websites are still using it but it's not unreasonable now to say, enough is enough. Surely.
Update: George Ornbo at Shapeshed has created a small JavaScript file that will display a notice on your website if you want to encourage your website visitors to upgrade from IE 6 to another browser.
Comments
27 Jul 2009 16:55:51
Taking the traffic of a site at random it has more traffic from IE6 than Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Mozilla put together. And in most cases these users don’t have a choice – their IT departments haven’t upgraded their browser! Would a shop turn away one in five people?
But it all depends what you mean by support – should the site look exactly the same? No – you can get away with cutting down on any problem elements. But should the site work the same? Yes of course!
I use an all purpose style reset, I avoid putting width and left/right margin/padding on the same item, I use a png fixer for IE6, and I avoid CSS3 properties (nice as some are, support just isn’t really consistent enough yet). In most cases I only need to make a few tweeks (IE specific stylesheet) for the site to pretty much be the same in IE6.
IE8 on the other hand gives me a headache, as it seems to not like some css selectors which work in everything else (IE6 included). E.g. ‘div li’ wouldn’t work, whereas ‘div ul li’ would.
27 Jul 2009 17:18:35
@daylightgambler: Yes, I would generally agree. I would never be happy with a website that did not work in IE6 and the ‘support’ that I mean is mainly related to spending time ‘just checking’, firing up the old PC, and sometimes solving relatively small cosmetic problems. I don’t tend to spend a lot of time on these and agree that not all websites should look the same in all browsers. I guess my post reflects what I was thinking when I tested just now with my old PC. It just seemed kinda crazy as the old hard drive whirred into life and the Windows 98 logo came up.
22 Aug 2009 00:03:22
Until Microsoft can understand that many people want to view the websites and not toolbars, I will never update from IE6. 3, 4, 5 rows of toolbars is ridiculous, especially if you are navigating the web on a new netbook. Until I can get IE 7 or 8 with a one row toolbar, no thank you. It is just the web for gosh sakes, a browser is pretty much a window.
22 Aug 2009 08:26:58
@Bry; I use IE 8 with most toolbars turned off for the reasons you say. I think it’s relatively easy to turn these off? For netbook usage, I recommend F11 Full Screen mode where the toolbars are hidden and the browser window is maximised. It gives more screen space I find and the toolbars just appear when your mouse is near the top of the screen. This works well for me.
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