Do I stop supporting IE6?

Posted At : 26 April 2009 15:10 | Posted By : Glyn Jackson
Related Categories: Chit Chat and Reviews, ColdFusion

Cross browser compatibility has always been a pain for me, I spend hours at the end of every project tweaking and writing hacks to combat IE6's lack of support for current standards in HTML markup and CSS etc.

Now Microsoft in their wisdom seem to have 3 completely different rendering engines. I find myself having to now write hacks for IE6 along with IE7 and now IE8, sometimes adding a day or more to testing.

Now please no comments like... "well I design to standards so have no problem with this" as thats crap, remember I am talking about a browser that does not even support the CSS 1.0 standards created in 1996. It has no PNG transparency support and many more issues I dont want to go into

The question I want to ask other designers and/or developers is "do you still support IE6 for your clients" by support I mean promise your application/site will work and display the same in IE6 as it does in IE7 and IE8.

?

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tambi's Gravatar Well we try hard not to NOT support it. Its like a pain in the ass. Whenever we implement a new feature on a site were building first it works on Firefox/Safari/chrome then it breaks a bit on IE7 then it breaks into pieces on IE6.

I try to explain to the users that supporting IE6 is like supporting windows 3.1
# Posted By tambi | 26/04/09 15:57
Will Wilson's Gravatar I use blueprintCSS (www.blueprintcss.org/) on all my design work, which covers most IE6 issues, but I don't tend to actively support IE6 on any additional code I add to it. I'd expect most people to be running IE7...although I'm sure a fair few people still aren't.
# Posted By Will Wilson | 26/04/09 16:31
Robert's Gravatar I have been using firefox lately and I really like it. IE6 has some issues and you mays well go to IE7 if you have to.
# Posted By Robert | 26/04/09 16:36
Amer's Gravatar I think you do, cause many people are still working on IE6 that comes with windows xp and they didn't upgrade or used the Firefox cause they don't know about anything.
Just open browser and enter the name they want.
# Posted By Amer | 26/04/09 17:42
Russ's Gravatar All of my income is from web development, and I rarely test in IE6. Maybe I'm just lazy... but I've found that most of the stuff I write works in IE6 anyways, maybe not perfectly, but as long as the website is usable then I'm happy.
Using jQuery helps keep my javascript compatible, and then I have a few things that I can remember that IE6 doesn't like, so I just don't do those things.

So I guess even though I don't test in IE6, I do keep it in mind subconsciously.
IE6 is lame and everyone hates it, but around 20% of users still rely on it, which is more than Chrome+Opera+Safari+IE8 combined. That number is steadily dropping, but I don't think we'll be able to completely ignore IE6 for another year at least.

Think if we had a demographics breakdown of IE6 users then it would be easier to decide which websites need to support it and which don't. Age, language, country... all of that would help.
# Posted By Russ | 26/04/09 19:34
Gary Fenton's Gravatar IE6 users still account for a large number of visitors, way into double figures. Lots of big corporates and government departments still use IE6. So if I built a commercial site that didn't support IE6 then my client would lose at least 30% of their potential business because of my laziness.

A good web developer should feel duty bound to maximise the audience for their client, therefore until IE6 usage drops below 3% I will continue to make my sites compatible with it. To be honest it doesn't take anymore effort than supporting IE7. And I force IE8 to use IE7 compatability so really I'm just developing for 1 IE engine Of course I still test on all 3 IE engines. I've found that jQuery supports IE6 pretty well and over time you tend to know what works and what doesn't, plus little tricks to sort things out.

Opera has less than 1% of the market but I still test for compatability, along with Google 1+2, FF 2+3, and Safari 3. Yes, it's a pain but I pride myself on making it happen and supporting 99% of visitors who choose to visit my clients' sites. As a result the sites tend to work well on modern mobile browsers as an added bonus.
# Posted By Gary Fenton | 26/04/09 20:02
Glyn Jackson's Gravatar Thanks for the replies. I was just trying to get others opinions on this, many thanks. Most of my clients are B2B so they see upgrading as risky and any interruption to their day to day operations is a big no, no! I think this is a common problem that most suffer from, that and applications that have been designed for a browser version and not future compatibility. I design in FireFox and work backwards to IE6. Microsoft need to learn to conform! Why did they start again with IE8? Mozilla have a common engine. Never mind, rant over. :)

@ Gary Fenton your comments are very true, but depending on what your clients are asking for some of our applications are now started to get limited on IE6 and jquery and AJAX need hacks and workarounds more and more now. for the time being its not a lot of work as you said, but I do hope in the future its dropped
# Posted By Glyn Jackson | 26/04/09 20:11
Craig Kaminsky's Gravatar Unfortunately, I think it's still a necessity to support IE6. With the large install base across government agencies (state and federal) and the large number of lingering IE6 users outside those offices makes it impossible to ignore.

That said, I'd sure wish I could just stop having to deal with it!!
# Posted By Craig Kaminsky | 26/04/09 22:30
Mike's Gravatar I think it depends on the application you are writing. We often make sure public Web sites work in IE6, but management screens, CMS, etc require IE7. In many situations, we push it back to the client and let them decide. We add billable hours to a project for IE6 compatibility. We give them statistics on browser usage and let them decide.
# Posted By Mike | 26/04/09 23:34
Freelance Web Developer's Gravatar Fortunately, there is a meta tag / header that tells IE8 to render in IE7 mode. At least that takes one rendering engine out.
# Posted By Freelance Web Developer | 27/04/09 02:01
Mike's Gravatar Be careful with that META tag. It only impacts the page rendering. It does not impact the JavaScript execution. You'll still need to test your apps with JavaScript in IE8.
# Posted By Mike | 27/04/09 13:57
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About Me

Glyn Jackson, 28 years old, MD and senior developer of a development firm based in Staffordshire called Newebia Ltd. Academic background in BSc Information System & Internet Commerce. Online marketing expert (EE Ranked) and .NET developer. Has been developing with ColdFusion for 5 years and loves it. "I am not a veteran in ColdFusion but I do work on challenging projects which help me learn more about ColdFusion and if I can contribute to the community in anyway then, it's all good!"

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