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Comment by stevejalim | Hacker News Reader

If they're non-billable hours, you're missing a 'Full IE6 support is a chargeable extra, not core functionality' bit to your agreements ;-)

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Not very realistic. If you put it forth like that 1-3 years ago you would have the argument, "we want IE6 support, skip the others, and of course this will not cost extra".

Edit: I'm surprised to be down-voted. Many clients that have standardized on IE6 still exists. 3 years ago there were even more clients that used IE6, and probably forbid other browsers, including IE7/IE8.

I've personally fought for making my web apps work on every reasonable browser, and gotten the arguments that the client will not pay for anything but excellent IE6 support.

I think a line should be drawn between 'works on IE6' (not too much extra work) and 'looks as good on IE6 as on a modern browser' (a fair amount more work). I, too, ensure all my stuff works on IE6, but whether it looks as good is down to the client's call/budget.

To be honest, I'd rather not support IE6 than getting paid for supporting it. No (realistically paid) amount of money can offset the pain and frustration of supporting the browser-like piece of near-software that is IE6.

Its true. We pitched this exact thing. You want IE6 support, we need 30% more time on UI work at least. They either agree or take away IE6 support. And I don't make this crap up.

YES. This is exactly the right approach. It DOES take more work to support. If they want to pay for it, fine. But it also exposes the internal "upgrading is expensive" excuse as fallacious. NOT upgrading is also expensive. At some point the balance tips and it's time to move on.

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