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

When developing sites for clients, I absolutely support IE6. Unless I get the explicit permission to skip it; and guess what, that hasn't happened yet. In that case I restrain myself from using techniques that I know won't work in IE6. There's always another way to do things, even if it's slightly less pretty.

When toying around with my own stuff that I'm not planning on making any money with, I explicitly give myself the permission to skip IE6 to be able to try some new, fancy stuff. I try to have it at least degrade gracefully though.

Is this overall frustrating and not much fun? Sure. Live with it.

You can't just decide on a whim to drop support for a major browser, unless practically nobody in your audience uses it. If you have hard data that regularly only two of your visitors every month use IE6, you can consider dropping support for it. But as long as significant number of your visitors use it, and even 1% is quite significant, you'd only harm yourself.

Answer 2

Like it or not, IE6 is here to stay for a good while yet.

The best you can do is use frameworks and libraries (like jQuery) that make life easier for you.

Answer 3

No.

BUT it always depends on your target visitors. You might want to look at the analytics data of your previous projects to see which browsers your visitors are using. If a huge percentage of your target visitors are using IE6, then it's to you and their benefit that you make your sites IE6 compatible.

Some 15-20% of people who surf net still use IE6. If your company can live with that fact and have a way on convincing all of your site users to upgrade to IE8 or even use Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera, then that would be better.

Microsoft will stop support on IE6 by 2014! Hooray!