Now that Internet Explorer 6 is over seven years old, should developers drop support for the aging browser? I can safely say that nothing infuriates me more than coding for this poor excuse of a browser. If you've ever designed and coded a website to work with IE6 you know what I mean.
IE6 Release
I don't fault Microsoft for the development of IE6, I fault them for not updating the broken browser for over five years. I believe Microsoft has a huge responsibility to produce a quality (secure and standards compliant) product. With the release of IE6 Microsoft thought they had won the browser wars, and indeed they did. But they also failed miserably with IE6 by shipping a product that was broken. To put a product on every Windows PC that immediately compromised the security of that machine was totally irresponsible (and “Patch Tuesday” was no solution).
Several of my sites still get a good amount of IE6 traffic.
IE6 went without a major update longer than it should have. Today Internet Explorer 7 has been out for over two years but IE6 still has a strong following. By some accounts IE6 still has approximately 20% of the browser share and over 25% on most of the sites I manage. It took the release of XP Service Pack 2 in 2004 to kill IE5. Now the release of Internet Explorer 8 is just around the corner with the promise of CSS 2.1 support and standards compliance. One can only hope this brings about the end of IE6.
Dropping IE6
There has been a lot of talk of dropping IE6 support amongst the development community for over a year now. Some companies have already started. So should I potentially alienate upwards of 25% of my audience by only designing for IE7? There are three main factors I look at when determining IE6 compatibility: the project, client and audience.
Project
Does the project require functionality or features only available in IE7 and other modern browsers? Are the features truely needed? If so, are there workarounds for IE6 that can be implemented without too much time and cost?
Client
Does the client have any browser requirements? Are they or any of their representatives using IE6 internally? Can they update? If a client requests support for IE6 I find out exactly why they want it, there may be a middle ground.
Audience
Who is the anticipated audience? Younger users are more likely to be up-to-date, corporate users are likely to be running older software. Site analytics are very helpful when determining the audience's capabilities for a given project.
The Answer
Weighing all the variables I have yet to completely ignore IE6 on any project. What I am currenlty doing is targeting the largest segment of my audience and providing them the best user experience I can. This means taking advantage of the features that IE7 and modern browsers have to offer while maintaining a structurally sound website in IE6. For most of my new projects I’m content if the site in IE6 maintains the functionality, branding, identity and content availability and IE7 contains the embellishments. Am I going to check every post on my personal site in IE6, no. Am I going to make sure client sites are not broken in IE6, absolutely.
In the end, the internet is always in flux. As a developers we are at the mercy of the browser. Ideally we should be following these tides of change and updating our sites when the time comes. Personally I'd be happy if Internet Explorer didn't exist, but it does. When IE6 market share drops into the single digits, I'll feel comfortable focusing of purely modern browser support.
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