Amir M. Sahib

1 | Jeremy

November 25th, 2008 at 3:58 pm

The problem isn’t web developers – I don’t know a single other webdeveloper who doesn’t hate IE6. WE ALL HATE IT. We developers are forced, however, by clients who demand support for IE6 because their company couldn’t afford (the time) to upgrade their company computers – or old people who don’t even know what a browser is and still use ie6-based AOL.

The problem really boils down to education. These people wouldn’t want to use IE6 anymore if they realized what sort of security and compatibility issues it had. Unfortunately, educating these people is near impossible. We’ll just have to wait till they die out or upgrade to Vista

2 | JasonH

November 25th, 2008 at 4:03 pm

As a developer/designer for an internet company, we just had a discussion about this very issue. We just launched a new site design, and I had suggested we spend very little time cleaning up the site for ie6, and we post a banner in the page headers telling our users they need to upgrade. The lead developer was against the idea at first–our stats show about 20% market-share for ie6. That’s 1 in 5 people that our business would be cutting out of our potential customer base. Just not feasible. So, we compromised. I got to leave the ie6 “please upgrade” banner in the header, and then I got to spend 5 hours making the site look good for ie6.

3 | Sean

November 25th, 2008 at 4:09 pm

I read a good idea in an article the other day: Charge development for older browsers as a separate line item in your estimates/invoices. Clients who really want it will pay extra for it, and most will decide they don’t need IE6 support that badly.

4 | Brian Vuyk

November 25th, 2008 at 8:06 pm

Lots of institutions and organizations also have strict policies over what is installed on their machines. I’ve worked in workplaces recently where IE6 was *the* browser. Not because it was the best, but because there were strict policies in place over how and when upgrades are performed.

You’ll see the last of IE6 when most businesses have transitioned away from XP. In the meantime, I just install IE7 on every system where it hasn’t been done yet, and is feasible to do so.

5 | Matt

November 25th, 2008 at 10:04 pm

I work for a large corporation and we run IE6 on most of our computers because as part of agreements we have with suppliers, we must run their programs which only work on IE6. We can’t upgrade our browsers and still sell their (very popular) product, nor will they upgrade their programs. What choice do we have?

6 | Azeem

November 26th, 2008 at 4:43 am

Because 20% is still too large a percentage to ignore.

I agree that every single designer/developer hates IE6 – but one very important point is the developer has absolutely NO RIGHT to say what browser a user should or should not use.
This is not the decision of a developer. Should we stop designing for screen readers either because it take a little more work? Where does it end?

Yes, most people would be better off with FF or IE7, but there are situations in a some environments that might not allow a person to use anything but IE6. It is thus wrong (and frankly unprofessional)l for the designer/developer to penalise these people just because IE6 makes their job a little harder. Especially when the percentage is 20 odd percent.

For a personal website it is probably acceptable to only design for FF – but any commercial website is a whole different story.

7 | Mark

November 26th, 2008 at 6:36 am

@Azeem: I disagree with you when you say ‘IE6 makes their job a little harder.’

It is not ‘a little work’. It fundamentally changes the development of a website, and forces the developer to use hacks, or non-standard ways to ‘fix’ the site. This is not only bad practice, it also corrupts the standards these browsers claim to be compatible with.

In the long run, it’s much more important to deliver standard-compliant websites, since the amount of hard- and software with web-browsing capabilities is only going to rise. Text-browsers, mobile phones, etc.

Also, to make your content accessible to machines it’s of the utmost importance to have separation of content and visual design. If a program/platform forces you to change content based on design demands, that program/platform is poorly thought through, and should be replaced. (I want to make very clear here that I don’t mean hardware limitations such as resolution!)

Seeing the enormous drop in Internet Explorer usage in the past 10 years, I am confident we will get rid of IE6 eventually. If Microsoft produces an Operating System that performs as well as XP, people and companies will transfer and we can forget about the scourge of IE6.

I personally do not develop for IE6. I will try to keep the site acceptable in that browser, but I draw the line at having to change the content.

8 | Azeem

November 26th, 2008 at 8:30 am

@Mark: Although I absolutely agree with you that hacks etc are bad practice and corrupts standards we are in a situation where we have IE6 and we need to deal with it somehow.

There are 2 sides – From a standards progression point of view I agree that we need to get as far away from IE6 as possible and strive for a developers utopia where we didn’t need to worry about such problems and get on with the work – but sadly from a business point of view where money is at stake, supporting IE6 is always going to win. In the end it will always come down to money.

Boss: “Will it cost us if we don’t support IE6?”
Dev: “Yes”
Boss:”In that case we must support IE6″
Dev: “But it will take longer to develop”
Boss:”Irrelevant – the money lost from IE6 exclusion will surely surpass the money spent on longer development”
Dev: **cries**

We all agree that the program/platform in question is poor and should be replaced – but it’s easier said than done.

At my work I must develop for IE6 no question because it is a known fact that many of our subscribers use IE6. The company won’t simply ignore this and lose thousands of dollars in favour of supporting the standards movement.

9 | Mark

November 26th, 2008 at 10:54 am

Azeem, I understand your point. I agree with you, but in my experience there are some situations where the extra development time is in fact much more expensive than the possible gain.

This goes mostly for static websites with low volume of visitors, like for non-Internet businesses.

I had to explain several of my customers that it does not pay to develop for IE6, and most of them eventually chose the cheaper (non-IE6) solution.

But to be honest, If I design a community (high-volume of visitors) site, I keep IE6 in mind for sure. Again, it’s not impossible to develop a site for all browsers, it’s just a load of basically useless work.

10 | askmuslim volunteer

November 26th, 2008 at 5:49 pm

I like your site, keep up the good work.

11 | ande

July 13th, 2009 at 9:38 am

If developers started charging EXTRA to build for IE6 then maybe the industry could force the hand of the user (also you’re essentially not so annoyed about doing it in the end)… also what about the classic warning page for IE6 users saying this website is optimised for IE7 and IE8, if you’re still using IE6 then we suggest you upgrade or this website will not work for you. We’ve done this for years.. why not do it for IE6

12 | James Rand

July 20th, 2009 at 7:35 pm

IE6 has about 7 years worth of security patches that bring it up to current standards, so while it might be a real problem out-of-the-box, it is no less secure than IE8 when patched.

My question to you is why would you expect people with older systems to upgrade to the bloated IE8 browser to deal with overall system slowness, new security instabilities, and untold privacy issues?

13 | Greg Smith

August 12th, 2009 at 2:03 pm

Development standards are getting to the point where we can tell a client who is requesting a certain feature on their new site “Yes, of course we can do that, but it won’t work in IE6, so you have to choose. Awesome cool features, or everything works in IE6. One or the other.”

Is it 100% true? No, not really. I can probably spend 12 more hours to find a way to make it work in IE6, but it’s a waste of my time.