Should we support IE6 anymore? [closed]

Are we supposed to find workarounds in our web applications so that they will work in every situation? Is it time to do away with IE6 programming?

Solution 1:

It's all about putting in enough effort so that your site degrades gracefully as you go to older and older browsers (or for disabled users). Unfortunately, there are a lot of IE6 and IE7 users out there who more or less can't switch, so it seems unlikely that your site will force many to do so. If your site just looks bad, that's okay. If it's unusable, you have a real problem. In general, the more you adhere to current standards (instead of just chasing the latest browsers), the better you'll end up in old browsers without extra effort.

Solution 2:

This depends so much on the context of the application, and of its users. There are two key aspects: what browsers are your users using; and how important is it that they can access/interact with your site.

The first part is generally easily establish, if you have an existing version with stats (Google Analytics or similar is simple and great) or you have access to such data from a similar app / product.

The later is a little harder to decide. If you're developing a publically availalbe, ad-sponsored site for exmple, it's just a numbers game - work out how much of your audience you lose and factor what that's worth against the additional development time. If, however you're doing something specifically at the request of a group of users - like an enterprise web app for example - you may be stuck with what those users are browsing with.

In my experience those two things can change significantly for different apps. We've got web apps still (stats from last week) with close to 70% IE6 usage (20% IE7, the rest split between IE5.5 and FF2) and others with close to 0% IE6. For relatively ovbivous reasons, the latter are the kind of apps where losing a few users isn't so important.

Having said all that, we generally find it easy to support IE6 (and IE5.5 as others point out) simply because we've been doing so for a while. Yes, it's a pain and yes, it takes more time, but often not too much. There are very few situations where having to support IE6 drastically changes what kind development you do - it just means a little more work. The other nice benefit of supporting it (and testing for it) is that you generally end up doing better all-round browser and quirks testing as a result of the polarity of IE6's behaviours.

You need to decide whether or not you're supposed to find workarounds, based on the requirements of your app/product. That's it's IE6 isn't really that relevant - this kind of problem happens all the time in other situations, it just so happens that IE6 is a great example of the costs and implications of mixed standards, versioning and legacy support.

Solution 3:

It depends on your audience, and whether the cost (development, maintenance, opportunity cost of developing to a 7 year old lowest common denominator) is worth it to gain those IE6 viewers.

Also worth asking - is the IE6 demographic likely to care about or use your site? I think a large amount of IE6 users don't care about new technology (duh) or are accessing the web from corporate networks which restrict browser installations. Maybe those viewers aren't worth the effort - only you can answer that.

I was happy to see that Apple's Mobile Me site won't support IE6.

Solution 4:

There's no hard and fast rule on this. Supporting IE6 and IE7 takes an investment of time and knowledge that you may not have available, but on the other hand, if you want your site to look as you intend, it's an investment that has to be made. So the question becomes: which is more important to you?

You say the "if I check the statistics of the pages, i noticed that almost half of the visitors uses this kind of browsers," which says to me that unless you're OK with half your visitors seeing something other than the design/layout you intended, you're going to need to make that investment or get the help of someone who can.

If that's not an option, you could try using some of the CSS "frameworks," like Blueprint or Grid960, and see if that's easier, but that will require a little bit of learning as well.

The other options are either going with a simpler design likely to work across browsers, removing the stylesheet for IE6/7 and letting viewers see the raw HTML document structure, or using table-based layouts if you know how to wield them (and contrary to what some people will tell you, there's nothing at all wrong with this route if it's the one that best fits the requirements of your project combined with the constraints on your abilities and resources).