Is it time to stop supporting IE6?
Posted 19 April 2009 by Russ in CSS, Other stuff, XHTML.
Pressure to kill of IE6 is building amongst the web design and development community and some organisations have already foresaken it. But it’s probably not going to be that simple.
Microsoft recently announced that IE8 will be listed as a high priority item in the Windows Update service, which can only be a good thing. Firefox 3 for example has all but killed off legacy versions 1 and 2, perhaps partly because its users tend to be more tech-aware than your average IE user, but the more likely reason would seem to be the upgrade strategy Mozilla take – alerting you that an upgrade is available and enticing you to upgrade.
Windows Update isn’t as pervasive as Mozilla’s method though. I’ve seen regular users of the web completely ignore the Windows Update icon in their system tray so the IE8 message isn’t going to be on their radar. Then there’s the huge number of corporates out there that have Windows Update turned off or who have not yet rolled out IE7 onto their standard build, let alone IE8.
Finally, there’s the lowest common denominator: the computers whose specifications are so low that IE8 simply aint gonna be an option. It’s all too easy to think that those on these kind of computers aren’t going to be the type of visitors you’re seeking – perhaps they’re not your typical online gamer or don’t buy all of their luxury items online – but they’ll also include public environments such as libraries and community centres that don’t have the budget to upgrade their kit.
I expect to see IE8 gain a fairly rapid hold on the IE market but I’m still expecting to have to continue coding around the inadequacies of IE6 for some time. As much as the prospect of CSS3 and HTML5 amongst other things is exciting, from a commercial point of view, in the world of ecommerce I can’t afford to ignore a part of my user base that spend money with us using IE6. But there is a tipping point.
A fair amount of time and effort (and therefore money) goes into ensuring sites offer the best user experience in both modern and legacy browsers; how much will depend on the site and its business. While that cost is outweighed by the income derived from IE6 visitors, it’s fair to say that we should still look to support IE6. The point at which each business decides it’s no longer commercially worthwhile is going to differ on a case-by-case basis, but some have already made the leap.
37signals have given up the ghost. That’s not to say that their site is no longer usable in IE6, but it’s not got the same level of polish, as indicated by the difference in design caused by IE6’s lack of support for PNG transparency.
37signals.com in Firefox 3
37signals.com in IE6
There are others (like Yahoo’s Christian Heilman and the popular web design magazine .Net), are keen to see IE die, and there’s even talk of a return to scripts that will detect IE6 and alert the user that they should upgrade. For me this is a step too far back to old days when sites had to have a particular browser. Ironically enough it was typically Firefox and Safari users who were blocked from accessing sites because they weren’t using… IE6!
And then there are those that think IE6 should be saved. OK, so maybe this one’s toung-in-cheek, but I think we’ll be stuck with IE6 for a little while longer yet.