I must admit that some days I completely loathe IE6, and some days I prefer it above IE7! Yes I said it so what? It all depends what the designers dish up for that day and what methods I choose to go with to solve a particular browser problem. There has been much talk on the wire the last couple of months since the prophets over at 37Signals (interesting post on 37Signals) decided to make a public statement in their blog with regards to their discontinuing of IE6 support across all their products, maybe not as harsh as this guy’s approach but quite a severe move nonetheless. And since that faithfull day back in August ‘08 many developers have used this as an excuse to follow suite.
Now as I mentioned before I struggle with IE6 on a regular basis but I have come to learn all the little tricks and hacks in the book to make them go away and whenever I can, I try to weed out the problems at a design level since a simple drop shadow in the wrong place can make my life a living hell!
I would like to know from you guys, what your thoughts are on the “Support for IE6″ dilemma and what you plan to do about it with IE8 so close on the horizon?
Personally I will continue to support the underdog since we compiled some interesting statistics that showed 26.84% of users spanning 50 Clients websites for the period of one month (Aug – Sep 2008) we using IE6. Thats almost a third of our traffic! Do you really want such a large percentage of your clients visitors to arrive at a crippled site?
I am going to leave you with that as a parting thought. Just remember that IE6 wont be around forever but I dont think forcing it out of the arena is the right way to go about it. Patience, I believe, is.
Jon
April 15th, 2009
As of March ‘09 according to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp IE6 has reached a low of 17%.
I would like to agree with the points you mentioned in this article but I gotta admit I am all for the discontinuation of development for IE6. The time taken to develop a decent looking site is compounded by all the annoying little fixes you have to do to get it displaying right in the old browser. Not to mention the near impossible complications when dealing with transparent PNGs.
Granted there are ways around these things but isn’t it about time we as developers started pushing the world to move on and let IE6 go… for progress sake?
I would agree that you probably wouldn’t want to display a message as strong as the link you posted in your article for IE6 users. A simpler and far more polite solution I have been using is a plugin for Wordpress called Shockingly Big IE6 Warning (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shockingly-big-ie6-warning/). Despite its name, it provides you with a few subtle and not so subtle options for how you want to deliver the bad news to your website’s visitors that they are using an antique for a browser.
This politely lets the user know that IE6 is insecure and outdated and provides links to download any of the newer browsers out there.
Use it, don’t use it… either way, IE6 is on its way out… and patience is definitely a virtue.
Webaholic
April 15th, 2009
I totally agree Jon, IE6 is on it’s way out (thankfully) but those of us that develop websites for paying clients cant post warning messages unless the client approves and I think that something like that could be a negative for the clients site. We’ll just have to suck it up and patiently help this old lady cross the road without pushing