Is Internet Explorer 6/7 Support Required Now? 512
k33l0r writes "Following Google's announcement ending support for Internet Explorer 6, I find myself wondering whether we (Web developers) really need to continue providing support for IE6 and IE7. Especially when creating Web sites intended for technical audiences, wouldn't it be best to end support for obsoleted browsers? Would this not provide additional incentives to upgrade? Recently I and my colleagues had to decide whether it was worth our time to try to support anything before IE8, and in the end we decided to redirect any IE6/7 user-agent to a separate page explaining that the site is not accessible with IE 6 or 7. This was easy once we saw from our analytics that fewer than 5% of visitors to the site were using IE at all. Have you had to make a choice like this? If so, what was your decision and what was the reasoning behind it?"
IE6 outdated. (Score:5, Informative)
We're a web company, making different kind of websites for different kind of people. Which means we make anything from small "Mr and Mrs Smith My Pink Pony" kind of sites, to web shops with 5k+ transactions per day.
We recently (within the last year or so) put a note on our contracts, stating we don't support IE6 anymore, unless the customer is actually paying extra for making the appropiate changes. It was just too much a hassle to manage all the hacks and workarounds all the time.
So basically, we state we only support the latest generation of browsers, included IE7 since the migration to IE8 isn't complete yet. A lot of people still on IE7.
And IE7 isn't TOO bad, the work arounds is mainly CSS, the rest is worked out by MooTools, Prototype, etc.
sometimes users don't control their machines (Score:2, Informative)
I worked for a federal agency and just this past summer we were finally upgraded to IE 7 - a lot of places where security is tight the IT people can be overly cautious when upgrading software, meaning employees could be years behind. If your site is something I need to access (technical documentation, etc) I'd be pretty annoyed when it wasn't my fault I couldn't access it because I'm not allowed to update my own machine.
Re:No more support (Score:1, Informative)
No it would be nice if sites didn't even look at the (optional) user-agent header and just supported standards (particularly html + css) rather than specific browsers.
Re:Why redirect them? (Score:4, Informative)
For basic websites, I highly recommend Universal IE6 CSS [google.com].
I've decided that I will never design a website that supports IE6, but instead will only server up this rudimentary (if nice-looking) style sheet. As long as your website is standards-based, compliant, and content-oriented, this CSS file works great. You do, however, have to include some of those annoying <!-- [if lt IE 7]>...<![endif]--> tags.
For web apps, which are more complex, then I use a browser sniff and redirect IE6 users away. I don't care how "bad" or "evil" it is. It's better, to me, for users to know why a page doesn't work, than see a partially loaded page or pile of garbage.
Re:I'm posting this from IE6. HELP! (Score:1, Informative)
easy. tell them microsoft is ending updates and support for ie6 in july.
therefore if they stick with ie6, they'll be stuck in a deadend.
the early they switch, the more money they'll save later on.
Re:Why redirect them? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Easy Answer (Score:4, Informative)
Standards compliant pages support lynx pretty well, lynx will simply ignore things it doesn't support and render the alt-tags instead of images etc. So long as you chose sensible names for the alt tags the textual page content is perfectly viewable. I use lynx quite often and find it great for getting to information quickly on well designed sites, without being distracted by any of the fancy graphics.
IE6 doesn't degrade gracefully, it doesn't ignore unsupported features like lynx does, it tries to render them and botches the job totally.
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why redirect them? (Score:3, Informative)
THERE IS NO FUCKING EXCUSE for not being able to support multiple browsers. if you're not supporting links, you're doing it wrong (seriously, how the hell are supposed to work blind's web readers if your site is a javascript meatball?)
IE 6 has unique CSS layout issue, both bugs and less tolerant reactions to dodgy things in your CSS. There are some standard/recommended web design practices which tend to cause IE 6 rendering failures. And if you're unlikely, the failures are of such a kind that it makes part of the web site unusable. And even with templating and uniform page layout, such bugs tend to show only on specific pages, so you really need to do full tests with IE 6.
Links support is easier in comparison, except that some text-mode browsers do not support <button> (but I think that was w3m).
In the end, you need to listen what your users want. If the sporadic IE 6 layout issue is fine with them, don't test on IE 6.
Re:Why redirect them? (Score:2, Informative)
An upgrade from IE6 to IE7, IE8 or Firefox can be had from Microsoft / Mozilla Foundation
I agree with you regarding Mozilla. However, there are those of us who refuse to ever give Microsoft another cent, who are still using Windows 2000 for our 'doze boxes. I never intend to use a legal or illegal copy of XP or any of the other drek they have published. I'm just waiting for them to die instead. So I cannot 'upgrade' from Internet Explorer 6. It would not be a free 'upgrade.'
I use SeaMonkey on NetBSD mostly instead, of course, so the point is moot.
Re:Yes and No (Score:1, Informative)
then you should also know that spam bots use browser strings of ..... yes, usually some IE version and usually IE6 because it pretty ensures that the website will not attempt to try fancy things with this outdated piece of crap (AKA browser).
Learn to read your logs!
Re:Easy Answer (Score:2, Informative)
How well do your current pages support Lynx? Does that answer the question?
And how much code is there that is IE6 specific that IE7/8 isnt compatible with?
It's not so much a case of code not being compatible with IE6, it's more that IE6 botches layout.
You can create a perfectly accessible, standards compliant site (that looks just fine in Lynx), but in IE6 will have broken backgrounds, weirdly positioned bits, overlaps of boxes etc.—in short a site that looks terrible to the user. The developer, who would like users to perceive their site as looking nice, rather than a broken mess, then has to spend time (sometimes a lot of time) trying to pin down special site-specific IE6 fixes (that sometimes aren't standards compliant) to make IE display the site the same as all the other browsers manage to.
Re:IE6 outdated. (Score:2, Informative)
I work for a passenger airline, and a big part of my job is making the migration from IE6 to IE8 happen smoothly. It's going slow as molasses, to be honest. With 50k+ workstations scattered all around the globe and many thousands of apps to test and remediate, the transition to IE8 isn't going to happen as fast as we, our suppliers and our customers want it to happen.
Honestly, I'd love nothing more than to be free of that craptastic piece of shit browser, but the reality of keeping the planes in the air gets in the way. Plus, there's this annoying shortage of freely available money, so we can't just throw buckets of green at the problem like we used to. We have to pay for remediation as the budget allows.
We've had a few vendors come to us and say "We're not going to support your browser anymore, we don't like coding for it". Our usual response is "We're not going to support giving you any more money, we don't like paying you for it". They grumble, whine and cry, but 9 times out of 10, they cave. Being able to say that we're a major customer is a big thing to some vendors. Some even point it out on their website. Partner airlines are often required to buy a given product just because we use it and it's compatible with our way of doing things. Losing us as a customer means they stand to lose all these other airlines as customers when we choose a replacement vendor.
We've had a (very) few purists walk away from the money. As annoying as that is, I have to respect these few vendors that stick to their guns. Then again, replacement vendors willing to prostitute themselves by doing IE6 'hacking' are cheap and plentiful.
Re:Easy Answer (Score:4, Informative)
Lynx isn't obsolete, it's last stable release was July 5th 2009. It is still in active development.
IE6 has a zillion quirks in it such that the easiest approach is often to have one website for IE6 and another for everything else.