How best to convince people to upgrade IE?

Question

I recently asked a question that got shot down for being too strongly worded. I'm having another go today because it's something I really am concerned about and I really do want feedback and ideas from the smart people on SO.

IE6 isn't quite the bane of my existence, but it's close. I'm a web-developer and spend too much time fixing things for IE6. Considering its age and relative quality, I'm shocked so many people are still using it.

I understand that some companies still use it for legacy internal webapp support but I've found two companies now that haven't upgraded solely because XP's automatic updates doesn't offer it by default (you have to go through the browser-based Windows Update to install IE7/8).

So forgetting those that need it, how would you convince an individual or organisation to upgrade to a newer version of IE?

Do warning banners work? I've considered skipping doing the IE6-fixing before and putting a "This site works best in..." statement up but surely having a poorly-rendered site makes me and/or my client look bad, not IE6.

There are also people who don't need to keep IE6 but cannot upgrade because they're in a controlled environment. What is the best way to influence them enough to get their admins to do something about the problem?

Note: As I said last time, I don't care about moving these people to another browser. I don't mind giving them the option but this certainly isn't supposed to be a Firefox/FOSS uber-alles thread.

I'm also not looking for a fight, just constructive ideas on making business types aware of browser technologies in the least damaging way.

Edit: There are a couple of "you can't force it" answers. I agree, but I feel I could influence it. I tell people when I see IE6 but I'm not sitting behind every IE6 user that accesses a site I've made.

Consider health warnings on cigarettes. They don't force people to stop smoking but they do educate in a succinct and (nowadays) fairly brutal way. There's no doubt that educating people has had a massive effect on the numbers of smokers.

IE6 is a lot less addictive than smoking so, yeah, pushing the education idea seems like it might be able to influence the right people to do the right thing.

Answer 1

All it takes is time, vista ships with IE7, windows 7 will ship IE8. Although corporations will not switch over overnight, time will fix this

Answer 2

Are you aware of the Stop Living In the Past script? Just plop the script on your website to encourage IE6 users to upgrade, with a friendly, non-condemning message and link to the latest IE.

Answer 3

Download IE8, Google Chrome, Safari, or Firefox and show them how much faster they render a page than IE6.

Tell them that request caching does not work correctly with IE6 either (if you're using IIS)

But in all honesty, show them the speed of the newer browsers, especially if you are doing anything with a lot of javascript. The new rendering speeds are phenomenal.

Answer 4

If you're serving up content that your consumer base really cares about, but your site can't realistically function on IE 6, then I do a check if they're using browsers you don't support (IE 6) and if they are redirect them to a page specific to their browser (limited capabilities, not well supported, etc.) or just a page that says they're using a browser you don't support.

The point here is this: If they really care, then they'll harp on their IT department to get it installed. However, if you just let them use your site, but in a broken sense, then they'll just think your site is terrible and needs to get fixed.

Answer 5

From my experiences, if you're having rendering issues, it's typically a deeper issues with your css. Typically, I make one stylesheet and it runs more or less identically in both IE and Firefox.

For example, centering a div using auto margins won't work in IE if you don't explicitly include a doctype. This is really a normal expectation for an html document so the rendering issue isn't an issue to begin with.

These sorts of things travel up the totem pole. Unless you're using ASP.NET web controls, you should have no trouble making your divs render correctly in all browsers using a single stylesheet.

Answer 6

Oli,

I have been in your situation before. In all cases, I make sure my CSS and Javascript renders and works well in IE6, but then I add progressive enhancements for later browsers. Then I entice the customer by saying "I've added some extra things which you can see in newer browsers". This itself at most times makes them intrigued to make the switch.