Do you plan to support IE 6 on your future project

Question

I'm trying to make a pitch to my boss to drop support for IE 6. I find that a disproportionate amount of time is spent on trying to make the css IE 6 compatible and that could be spend on making new features or improving usability etc.

Do you plan to do so on your future projects and if so how did you convince others to support only newer browsers?

Answer 1

One of the problems with ignoring IE6 is that a lot of business users are still running it becuase either they don't know how to upgrade or they are not allowed to upgrade because of the IT security policy.

So if your these people also are the ones that actually pay you, you have a problem with ignoring IE6, as it will upset your paying customers. I used to work at a company where we had an online job board, and the income would come from the companies posting the jobs. But at the fall of 2008, we still had 25% of the users running IE6.

With that said, I'm not going to support IE6 on a new project that I'm working on, despite the fact that it will have companies as paying customers. We hope that by the time that we launch, IE6 will mostly be eliminated)

Btw, the solution we created at our job board had a normal clean, standards compliant CSS sheet, and then one with IE6 CSS hacks. If the browser was detected to be IE6, a CSS reference would be added to the style sheet containing hacks, a long with a reference to a javascript for implementing transparant PNGs.

Answer 2

We develop web applications for a customer that has a policy to run IE6. I don't understand that, because IE6 has still got security flaws that makes it safer to upgrade to a newer version. I have actually seen official statements by the norwegian government that instructs IT sections in the different departments to upgrade to IE7 because of this. But since our customer have a different policy, my hands are tied...

Answer 3

IE is tied the the operating system and since support of XP (IE6) is coming to an end i would say No.

Vista/Win7 will be running later versions of IE. But it will take some time for people/companies to upgrade.

Answer 4

Support it? Yes. With full design? Never.

Progressive enhancement is the way to go, and IE6 is so far behind any curve that it's not worth putting all your time into pixel-perfect design. But you still want your content accessible to everyone.

Andy Clarke offers a brilliant analysis and solution here:

http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/universal_internet_explorer_6_css/

Answer 5

How to convince your boss?

1) User browser stats

2) cost of hacking work minus profits from supporting the few users

Money is the thing, make him do the math.

Answer 6

If it's a paying gig, tell them you'll charge more unless it's an assumption going into the project. That's the only way it's worked out for us so far. I'm all for backwards compatibility but the amount of money wasted on supporting IE6 for most websites/applications is just ridiculous.