I don't know how to IE6 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how to IE6

blog.colbyrabideau.com

234 pointscrabideau5691156 comments

Why did you have the impression a B.S. in CompSci would teach you about legacy browser support?

I dunno, the first few weeks of my internship I had to do the same thing. If nothing else it was a great way to learn about what the company did by doing low-level grunt work. However I'd really recommend that if this is all you'll be doing for the duration of the internship, maybe look for something else.

Otherwise be thankful that you'll eventually have the flexibility to choose a career path that doesn't require you to maintain compliance with IE6.

I hate to make a "me too" like post, but as soon as I read his biography, I thought "... wait we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too?".

Are we now just leveling the playing field so experience is irrelevant, and kids just out of college should be able to compete with those who have been working the field for ages (ages which I might add included a time when IE6 was the dominant browser, and you ignored it at your own peril).

> we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too?

No, we should look seriously at whether we need to keep doing things the cheap labor can't perform anymore.

Supporting IE6 is a Black Art, and keeping people who can perform Black Arts reliably is expensive. I suppose the traditional comparison is to COBOL codebases and greenscreen IBM development. If thinking about that convinces you IE6 isn't the mainstream anymore, go for it. The point is that increasing the number of different, and I mean really different, browsers your team has to know about is not free, as the cheap labor only knows the relatively tight cluster of post-IE6 graphical browsers. The article's the evidence of that.

... and keeping people who can perform Black Arts reliably is expensive.

I have nothing to add ("me, too!"), but would like to point out that this sounds like a line from a fantasy novel written by an economist. If such a thing actually exists, I would love to hear of it.

Harald, by David Friedman. (There are a number of notable David Friedmans. This is the anarcho-capitalist-son-of-Milton-Friedman one.)

Harald is quite good, IMO, but there isn't a lot of overt economics so it may not be what you're looking for.

I really didn't think the GP would get an answer to that extremely specific question. Thanks, and I'll be checking this out.

For the majority of websites it's not so much a Black Art as something anyone who designed websites more than 5 years ago should manage competently (assuming there aren't unreasonable requirements such as pixel perfection or reproducing every hover effect). The comparison is more finding someone that knows how to program Python instead of copy/pasting PHP scripts.

Html and css were not designed to be an arcane programming language, but a simple layout markup. If well designed then copy paste should work fine. Arguably we didnt quite make that simplicity, but I think your Python PHP comment is way off as far as html css is concerned...

Re: fresh out of college kids competing with the oldtimers, I'm thinking that yes, the field is being leveled and certain types of experience are worth less and less. The greater the pace of innovation, the greater the chance that new tools are adopted that make certain knowledge obsolete. This is good in many ways, but it also requires constant learning and change, which is frustrating. Not that it's right or wrong, but I think it's the reality. Once this plays out, I really think we'll see calls for unionization, which would be unfortunate.

Re: supporting IE6, there's a cost associated with that. So if someone shows me that 20% of my traffic comes from IE6 users and that traffic is profitable traffic (enough profit to offset the costs) then yes, let's support IE6. But I think the payoff on supporting IE6 is becoming lower and lower.

Progress?

Why do some graybeards feel this sadistic need to make juniors learn pointless stuff (which archaic legacy support kludges for buggy browsers certainly are)? Please note that you may have spent better part of the last 10 years slowly learning about these workarounds, while making your own mistakes.

This is the most pointless type of elitism I have ever seen. Why not use the new advanced knowledge, this kids have? Some of them kids know more of how standards work than most graybeards. Pushing new fresh minds down the madhouse hallway that IE6 is, seems like a moral hazard to me. They might get the wrong idea.

Or are we going to demand that people write their own compilers and languages, before they even start doing productive work?

Mentality like this, wastes customers money all around while contributing nothing to the business or society at large.

IE6 support is not pointless if your target market includes banks and large corporates which are still using IE6.

They are wasting money by using IE6. Yes you can argue, that they pay for IE6 development and thus its their money and that we should not care.

However it is we who sell Win7 and IE6 support at the same time. And by supporting IE6 we lock our customers into stone age even more.

There are plenty of alternatives for any software that had to be done via ActiveX 7 years ago. It is completely our (industry) fault that banks and large corporates keep using IE6 - since we would rather milk them dry with our shitty solutions than to help them move on.

So what are you proposing... That banks and large corporates keep using Win XP for the next 10,20 years (????).

What about general productivity, usability, security, etc?

What these victims should (but will not) learn is that buying software on the cheap, with disregard to open standards is extremely costly and unwise.

Yes, it costs money to stop using IE6. It also costs money to deploy, test, train users to use, rewrite all other applications to use a new browser. When the former cost is greater than the lesser, businesses will upgrade.

I fail to see how its the fault of outside vendors that their clients or customers are still using an old browser. And if it's an in-house IT shop, it's purely a cost/business decision. You make it sound as if corporations are not upgrading out of laziness.

Same old set of excuses, covering gross negligence and incompetence that is going on in corporate IT departments. Its hard to train users and IT is against it - are two largest straw men arguments on this topic.

I was leading a development effort on this type of project and I took strong position that IE6 shall not be supported (due to some conflicting technical requirements in Request for tender). This specific IT department was delighted with our stance, since nowadays there are literally less than 5% of users who actually prefer their archaic IE6 solutions (which are usually people who don't actually use thy system, but are in position of "power"). This specific IT department also begged us to raise hardware requirements from 500Mhz Pentium III with 512Mb RAM (since that would enable them to push for an upgrade) - which we didn't.

Anyways - end users (yes those "computer illiterate" old ladies, everybody keeps on patronizing) were delighted by added usability that got enabled by using modern browsers. We were able to fulfill all the requirements a lot cheaper than dragging IE6 for that knucklehead department head would allow us to.

The fault of outside vendors is that they don't tell/show their users what they are missing on. The fault of outside vendors is that they don't explain security risks they are being exposed to, by using archaic software. The fault of outside vendors is that they don't help their customers to not pile even more opportunity costs related to stone age software.

Ok, how about considering a different demographic: China.

IE6 remains by far the most popular desktop web browser in China (Statcounter [1] says 50% of the market). If my site is targetting a Chinese audience, IE6 support is a must and no amount of persuasion will move the entire Chinese market to Chrome in a hurry.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-201007...

Another strawman. People using pirated OS's and being technically unsophisticated to the degree of being satisfied with what IE6 has to offer are extremely unlikely to buy your service or to provide any significant value to your advertisers. Basically they are leeches that will use whatever is cheapest/most convenient to them. Thus not having them as your user will only spare you some resources.

But if they really want to use your service - they will upgrade in a heartbeat (upgrading or changing a browser is no significant undertaking nowadays). If they are using your service via Cybercafes - they will get the proprietors to install another browser.

Your argument merely tells me that you either haven't developed or seriously thought about developing a service for Chinese market.

People in those areas using IE6 do pay for services. I know. We were debating this very question, and decided to look at our paid users browser choices, and IE6 was, while not the majority, not the least of our concerns, either. Furthermore, the net loss of loosing IE6 users would have been the salary of a number of people.

Finally, we can support IE6 without losing out on the benefits of newer browsers.

Arguing for or against IE6 using made up fanciful arguments (people using IE6 aren't going to buy your product) is silly. Look at your own numbers. If your first suggestion isn't that, you're ignorant of the realities of web development.

Any company still on IE6 has enough inertia that they aren't going to change for an external vendor, no matter how much that vendor hates IE6 support.

Then they need to be frozen out of ALL vendors. Eventually, it will hurt more to find the one guy left in the world who still does IE6 and pay him the ridiculous hourly rate he asks.

I think your last sentence explains why it will never happen - if one guy will be left making a killing by supporting IE6, why would everyone else have gotten out of the game? Certainly the ridiculous hourly rate he charges will offset the cost of maintaining IE6 support.

That said, I hate css as much as the next twenty-something web developer :)

I had to double-check to make sure you were actually responding to me. I'm the opposite of a greybeard, but thank you.

I was not trying to be grizzled when I responded, just realistic. Doing IE6 support is still a pretty fresh memory for me. It's just realistic.

I don't know if I misread your post or you edited it afterwards. When I originally read it I have seen punctuation that made your post imply that legacy browser support SHOULD be taught and that rookies SHOULD be indoctrinated in legacy support.

I apologize for misreading your post.

p.s.: If you had to support IE6 - then you are a graybeard :D. Even if you are a 25 year old graybeard.

Nope, never edited it.

edit: Also, I really like the layout of your blog. The font & placement of your headlines is really nice.

Thank you. I like it too. However credit goes to Posterous team, since its one of the default themes.

Thank you for reminding me about it. Must add more content.

You're 20. Working as an intern for a social networking company. I am sure life seems ideal to you, working on only modern technologies and being able to ignore things that are not perfect.

Outside of this sheltered life, you will have to be able to deal with people asking you to do things you would rather not do. Might as well accept it, instead of writing a blog post every time it happens.

Feels good advocating conformism while reaping benefits of thousands of years of nonconformist struggle?

>nonconformist struggle

The guy is whining about IE6. That's hardly a nonconformist position.

This is immaturely and badly argued. So it took a massive two days for an intern to add IE6 support to a web app. This is actually a good argument for keeping IE6 support for the several percent of users who still have it. I am not saying there aren't good arguments for dropping IE6, but this just isn't it.

Some of the supporting arguments are even worse - does he really expect a course called "Legacy Browser Support 301" to be taught at his college? And why would he need that course, seeing as how he managed fine all by himself? He could now teach that course better than any of the profs, who probably don't hack on IE6 conditional code.

There is also this refusal to look at things from a business perspective - he is working for a company which earns revenue from that web app that he worked on. If the revenue from IE6 users is greater than the value of 2 days of an intern's work, which seems likely, then the right decision is to throw in IE6 support. Now, if you have a massive stable of web apps (like Google) and it takes immense developer resources to support IE6 which will go away in a few years anyway, that's a different story. Change the inputs and you change the answer.

He seems like a good prog and a good guy, but he needs to mature some more.

This is off to the side of IE6, but I think we make a big mistake when we calculate costs that way.

It isn't simply a question of whether immediate revenue is greater than 2 days of an intern. The question is whether the projected revenue is greater than the support costs of that feature over time and the opportunity cost, i.e. "we can't do feature X easily because feature Y is in there." The fact that people don't calculate costs that way in software development puts many organizations in a pickle.

This article makes me very angry because the guy is coming across as looking for an excuse not to do the work. When I was building websites for IE 5 + 6 there was very little help out there - the bugs weren't documented and often you would be finding something completely new. I remember discovering an issue with HTML comments (!) after floating elements that seemed to not exist anywhere in Google.

Nowadays there are a ton of resources documenting all of the bugs out there because hundreds of people have already found and documented them. The site http://www.positioniseverything.net/ is a bible for developing through browser bugs, everyone knows about conditional comments, (not used until IE7 came out) and using Javascript is considered acceptable for so many more solutions or fixes. More importantly, there are a load of people who can offer help via many mediums, (Stack Overflow?) who have been there and done that.

Just because you don't agree with a business decision, don't invent excuses like this, you sound lazy.

Edit: In case I'm coming across as a grumpy old man, I started in the industry when I left University, so six years ago. I'm 29, not exactly a dinosaur.

First of all, welcome to the real world. While it may seem appropriate for your job that supporting a vintage browser from the start of the millennium is a bizarre concept, but for many people, particularly in business applications it's still a requirement and is likely to remain one for a good few years yet.

As tempting as it would be to write a lawn-getting-off comment about some of the garbage I've had to deal with in the past, let me just say that it doesn't matter when you start, there's always legacy support needed. At the moment, having IE6 as your legacy platform is a relative luxury compared to having to support a mish-mash of 32 and 16-bit platforms. There is only one IE6. Count your blessings.

I gladly offer to support IE6 to my clients, but i tell them it costs £50,000 in order to do it. Of those clients that initially asked me to support it none of them have taken up on the offer so far. :P

I hate web articles that don't have a publish date. This one would seem like a year and a half old.

It opened in a mobile-optimized view on my phone, and at the bottom it says, "2 hours ago." It's also listed under August 2011 on the Archive page. But I do agree that most blog posts are generally enhanced by the inclusion of the post date for context.

But if publishers actually follow that advice, they will find that people think the context is virtually invariably "old is bad" and watch their content get written off after a release window measured in days or, recently, hours.

http://blog.colbyrabideau.com/archive -- August 2011

Edit: OP is the poster of the blog also

I was confused for a few seconds when I checked the date and saw that it was currently July 2011.

It didn't even occur to me until you mentioned it. August is still six minutes away here.

>OP is the poster of the blog also

Cool, welcome to HN, Colby. It's a good first submission, have you been lurking long? Why not join the conversation?

Probably because he's being torn a new one further up the thread. Welcome to HN.

I'm happy we finally dropped IE 6 support at work, but I don't like the line of reasoning in this article. Having to tackle unsavory but necessary problems is what makes this a job; the ability to do so effectively is what makes you a professional. Two days doing IE6 compliance is not a big deal.

Saying it's necessary is begging the question.

But that is a business decision with engineering input, not the inverse.

Sure. But assuming "necessary" is a problem even when put in that context. It's trade-offs and cost-benefit analysis. The benefits are easily seen from the business side. The costs may not be obvious. A couple of days for an intern is just the start. There's the support over the entire product lifetime, and that's going to get worse and worse as time goes on.

2% of the US uses IE6. Explain that to your boss and ask if it's still necessary to support it.

[Update] For Google Apps, Google no longer supports IE7. YouTube support for IE6 was dropped a year ago, and they make a lot of ad money from YouTube now.

It really depends on the domain. That two percent can be the difference between wildly profitable and failing.

After all, Google still happily sells clicks to IE 6 users. If you're business relies on external ads and optimizing conversion rates, IE 6 remains a priority.

Google dropped IE6 support for YouTube over a year ago. They are dropping Google Apps support for IE7 on Aug 1st (that's today for some people reading this).

For search results it's probably more worthwhile and not as hard to support the IE's but for their other apps they say they are only supporting that two most recent browsers.

Google Search dropped mainstream support for IE6 last fall. IE6 users are served a degraded experience that is roughly on-par feature-wise with Google Search as it existed in May 2010, and new features are no longer rolled out to IE6.

I just couldn't help but think how cool would it be if they slowly added spiderwebs and dust to the pages that are served to IE6 users.

And this is how IE6 will slowly be deprecated across the industry. Sure it's easy for an intern to get up on his soapbox and proclaim, "We should stop supporting IE6 because that browser came out while I was still in elementary school." But when you look at the how many people still continue to use it, deprecating support is on a case-by-case basis, and it is irresponsible as web developers to just ignore that it even exists.

I would actually argue that Google Search is still supporting IE6, just as a degraded experience. Dropping support all-together means they just ignore it exists, which is far from the truth and likely won't happen for 5+ years.

Well, under that standard, Google Search still supports Netscape 4.7, which is also served a (slightly different from IE6) degraded experience. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it supports Netscape 1.0 and Lynx either.

I'm sure the videos still launch in the Flash plugin in IE6, so not sure how important dropping support is.

I seriously doubt IE6 support can be the difference between "wildly profitable and failing" for any business. Can you name one example of a failing company that started supporting IE6 and then became wildly profitable?

Obviously it would be the other way around, discontinuing IE6 support might lead to falling. Think of random niche industries with ancient old hardware and no-one who cares about software updates.

Fair enough, but I still don't think a business that is wildly successful would fail by discontinuing IE6 support -- even in a "random niche industry" where IE6 users make up more than 2% of their customer base. In fact, I doubt any of those businesses are currently wild successes. But I guess that all depends on how you define success.

Maybe not in 2011. But a couple years ago, it wasn't unusual to see 50% IE6 traffic on corporate-oriented apps.

And, yes, I can give a few examples were the webdevs ignored legacy browser support and got burned.

I'm genuinely curious to hear which web developers ignored legacy browser support and got burned. Please divulge.

Sure. The example I was thinking of in particular was an internal project from about 5 years ago where their CSS2 layout completely blew up on IE6. However rather than get down-n-dirty to fix it, they demanded additional budget for a rewrite using tables.

But just last week, another subcontractor apparently didn't realize that our government client was stuck on Flash v9 and spent the next two weeks trying to sort it out.

And it hasn't happened in a few months, but we used to get occasional complaints from clients stuck on Safari v4.

In terms of percentage that's pretty small, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. If you estimate the number of US internet users to be ~240 million, 2% is 4.8 million people.

Sure, a small chunk of the pie, but still a large chunk of people. And, in a hypothetical situation where your % of revenue generating visitors is exactly the same as for the overall population, not many companies would want to lose 2% of their revenue, or profit.

The blog post talks about Facebook development. Has Facebook ever released browser share numbers? I bet their target audience is a lot less than 2% IE6.

I was responding to a specific comment which suggested 2% is nothing worth caring about, not to the original blog.

That said, I would think that Facebook is mainstream enough to get it's fair share of non-technical users.

IE6 usage has nothing to do with technical vs non-technical anymore. Most IE6 usage in the US is due to stupid corporate policies, home users long ago moved on, and of course the current widespread mobile browsers are all way past IE6.

I optimistically hypothesize that users are less likely to access Facebook (or most other non-internal webapps) from a locked-down corporate desktop, and even if not, that those users also access Facebook from non-corporate systems, making the loss of access from the corporate system partly illusory -- if the posited loss is "2%", I think the actual loss is probably as low as 1%.

Opera has more market share. However, many sites don't support it. The iPad is already at 1% market share and should easily be at 2% within the next 12 months. It really depends on your target audience, of course, but which group of people would you guess has more extra cash to spend? I would target the iPad audience before the IE6 audience.

If it costs a large enough amount of money, they would. More precisely, they should. Why stop at IE6? There's still a combined large number of users using IE5 and IE5.5 and Lynx and NS4 and Amaya, etc.

In some cases, it may cost quite a large amount to continue to maintain and patch sites to also support IE6, and that money needs to be deducted from the 'profit' had from IE6 users. And more to the point, that same money being spent supporting those IE6 users could be being spent on bolstering mobile device work, newer browsers, assistive technologies, and what not.

The "well, we don't want to lose the profit from our users" has been thrown at me in the past, with the charge that "well, techies just care about gadgets/technology". No... in reality, many of us in the trenches (not all, but many) end up being better positioned to see the real business effects of these decisions. I'd much rather be working for a company that was spending its money wisely and being forward thinking rather than reactionary and wasteful. That's not a tech issue - it's a business issue.

Those browsers are not alike. If you follow standard advice - valid HTML, progressive enhancement, unobstrusive Javascript (or fallbacks where needed) - Lynx will render your snazzy 2011 page with the same fidelity as a 1995 Geocities page, and the result will be perfectly usable. IE6, though, will not only ignore your CSS3 stuff, but also completely misinterpret the things it does "understand".

2% may use IE6, but I'd guess that 2% uses the web WAY less than the other 98%. IE6 is probably 0.5% or less of total page views. As a group, IE6 users are also probably significantly less likely to spend money on the web.

Then there's opportunity cost. Time and budget spent on supporting IE6 could have gone into additional features. It's true that supporting IE6 is a business decision and it could be worth it for some companies, but even that 2% statistic makes IE6 seem a lot more relevant than it really is.

Considering so many use IE6 at work and so few at home, 2% of visits != 2% of the population in any meaningful way. So the question is more like: how important is it for my application that users at big corporations with outdated software can still use my app while at work instead of just at home?

Sure, perhaps 2% of the US as measured by some collection of large, publically facing websites. Now try taking that measurement again within the walls of a set of large corporations. This becomes particularly relevant if you're developing an internal application for one of those corporations.

I suspect that a large percentage of that 2% are business users who have an internal app which only works in IE6, and are therefore have to use it.

If 50% of your customers are among that 2%, IE6 matters.

If you're a social media startup, the customers looking for social media solutions are probably also the folks who are NOT running IE6.

There was story floating around here not too long ago that had IE 6 at around 4%. Incidentally, Safari was around 4%. I know a lot of devs that want to make sure things look great in Safari but don't care about IE 6 at all. Granted the obvious argument is that 4% of Safari users is a large percentage of Mac users, but it just goes to show how deceiving browser share numbers can be.

I'd also posit that while 2% may seem like nothing for a site with a small flow of traffic, it equates to a lot of money for a high volume consumer-oriented site. I run into a lot of this through my affiliation with Mogotest. During our customer development process I was amazed to find that several of the CTOs I sat down with will support any browser with greater than 0.5% share on their site. And these are guys that have definitely done their cost/benefit analysis.

Making things look great in Safari is generally as simple as making things look great in Chrome and then maybe tweaking some fonts (due to Safari's different font rendering behaviors).

Making things look great in IE6 often involves many hours and sacrifices of chickens to dark gods with names that have lost all their vowels.

The browser market share does not matter, the _conversion_ share does. I've heard from several large retailers that IE6 comprises a significantly higher share of their online sales than the market share would indicate. That could be because Grandma's PC hasn't been upgrade, but it might also be because people are buying stuff on their lunch hour with their nasty old IT-department-supported XP with IE6.

I look after an Australian e-commerce site. About 6.5% of our users are on IE6 (I assume they're mainly office-workers on shitty, out-dated PCs).

That is way too big a chunk of revenue to ignore in the name of ideals or standards or what-have-you.

But please, feel free to redirect any IE6 visitors to your blog to whatever the latest "IE6 is shit and you're an idiot" single serving site of the moment is.

I agree that IE6 is a turd, but have never found making my designs work in IE6 too much of a hassle. There has always been a positive ROI beyond just pleasing the spec-writers.

I think a lot of developers write overly complex, fragile mark-up with lots of nested floats and the like. Keep it simple and you'll realise IE6 support is generally just a few tweaks or at worst a conditional or two.

I try to make my websites work in ie6 but with minimal work, I'll let IE6 users use it but it will be a degraded experience and most of my website for normal people actually haven't seen such high IE6 usage as 6.5%.

Judging by http://www.ie6countdown.com/ IE6 is pretty popular in some parts of the world.

I think that's pretty much the best solution. For old browsers in general, have a legacy HTML-only fallback site. This makes IE6 and Lynx users happy alike :-) It doesn't need to be pretty but it needs to be functional enough to do all the stuff your customers need to do.

You're lucky - one of our clients is an Australian e-tailer, with ~30% IE6 traffic - I'd just figured that Aus was really behind on the whole browser thing.

Anyhow - agreed entirely, we support IE6 whenever theres >1% of visitors using it, as it's all potential revenue. That said, we have noted that IE6 users tend to spend less, so... stupid and cheap. Still, net win, though.

I think it is beyond IE6 now. I am seeing more and more projects that are "okay" with a degraded version of the site on a non-modern browser.

Web developers cringe at shadows, and "non-boxy" effects, because we know the hoops we need to jump through to get there. However, if the project is okay with a "degraded" version of the site, then you can use CSS3 and save time.

I think the mindset of "support" has to change. Sure, have your site work on older browsers, but the good stuff happens when you see it on a modern browser. Users who use shitty browsers, are used to sites looking shitty.

What Computer Science program would leave you buried in CSS for 2.5 years? If he meant he spent 2.5 years working with CSS on the side, why didn't he ever think "maybe I should learn legacy support"?

Because it's harder and not as cool as working on new stuff

He thought that's what the "CS" in "CSS" meant.

As product manager, one of the best things I've done for my teams is to fight to leave IE6 out of the spec whenever possible. Sometimes they appreciate it, and many times they don't know it, but I believe we've always shipped better products because of it.

Pretty much nobody supports IE6 anymore. I know how to IE6, like most devs a little older than the author. I just choose not to. Because I can.

> Pretty much nobody supports IE6 anymore.

That's just not true in my experience. We have two large corporate clients and one state agency that each require some level of IE6 support. I have a hard time believing these are the exception. I'd wager it's going to take a few more years to reach that point.

We have thousands of corporate clients and we tell them all the same thing: They can use any browser they like but it must be the latest / current version. Some of them grumble a bit but we've not lost a client because of IE6 in years.

So all of your clients (who use IE) are using IE9? I find this hard to believe, especially since many corporations are still running Windows XP, which will never get IE9.

Obviously the 'latest version' in that case would be IE8.

http://www.ie6countdown.com/ <-- 10% of the world still uses IE6. I would imagine most obsolescence conversations go like this:

"We should stop supporting IE6"

"What percentage of people use IE6?"

"10%"

"Hmm, 10% sounds like a lot of people ... let's support it!"

Hmmm... Let us look a little closer at that map. 2% of the US uses IE6. The numbers in Europe are pretty low too. This doesn't make sense..oh wait... China and South Korea are skewing the numbers. They're not important for our site, it's ok to drop IE6 support.

A good proportion of that 10% is in China however. So it's likely that you could easily cut that percentage in half, which is easier to digest.

I would love to stop supporting ie6 but I develop for customers in China and on the last count from our logs over 60% accessed the service with ie6. ( which, surprisingly, is about double of what is shown on your link )

Well, 10% of the world also uses Macs, but people don't seem to support that as much. Why not? Because it depends on the target demographic. IE6 usage is probably a lot higher in the corporate environments and thus matters to websites targeted at the corporate world, just like how if you're not targeting hip 20somethings, Mac support is unnecessary.

I do consulting and have been in many offices of large corporations in NYC, and I have not seen IE6 on a corporate PC in maybe 5 years. Macs on the other hand are practically neck-and-neck with PCs from what I have seen.

My image of an IE6 user is a 50 year old housewife with a spyware-invested eMachines they bought in 2002. I'm sure in other countries this could be very different but that has been my experience in the US.

Since there isn't a crap browser like IE on a Mac, you don't need to "support it", things will work fine if you follow standards.

If you're targeting developers or technology/art/design/movie professionals Mac usage is way above 10%.

10% of the population of the world use IE6, but that is heavily weighted by countries such as China (34%) and South Korea (22%)

If your target audience is English-speaking or European countries, the relevant proportion is 2% to 3% or less.

That's a pretty good level to start to consider whether supporting that small percentage is actually making you more money than you would if you didn't support their browser.

Does anyone know why Asia has such a high level of IE6 usage? I don't think it has to do with the computers being old, because IE6 usage is relatively high even in developed places like Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

My understanding is that it is very common in China because people mostly use a browser supplied by their ISP which is a rebranded IE6.

Well, that makes sense for China, but not for Japan, Hong Kong, or Singapore.

I imagine there are a large number of pirated windows xp copies in china

See http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2830887

A major reason in South Korea is that in the late 90s, the government mandated the use of ActiveX for online banking. This was only recently repealed, and the Korean government is now encouraging people to move on.

The government mandate encouraged many websites to also use ActiveX. South Korea is probably the only country where ActiveX is still in use. Internet Explorer has a browser share of 90-95% in Korea. IE6 is about 15-20% of this.

A clarification on Korea's ActiveX problem: Korea mandated 128 bit encryption via the use of an ActiveX control or plugin, but when Netscape bit the dust, there was no reason to update that plugin anymore.

The sordid history is here! -> http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/02/27/the-cost-of-monocultu...

And a further reason is that the Windows XP is still the most common operating system in use.

People don't feel any need to upgrade, as everything works with their current browser/OS.

I've used the internet at my Sister in law's (in Korea) - lightning fast internet speeds, with a creaking slow operating system full of bloatware.

I'm aware of the situation in SK, but what about Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore?

Remember also that it depends on your market. If you're making web apps for small businesses or banks...

A better argument than the figure today, is where it will be in a year.

From ie6countdown.com, click the line graph icon: http://www.ie6countdown.com/#chart

Extrapolate the line on its current trend and IE6 will not be even 1% in 13 months time.

Why invest a significant effort when the market share will evaporate within the year?

Further, if your project is going to take time to get traction, it may be a reality that by the time you're done the world no longer cares.

IE6 may be awful but if you're in a space with a high % of IE6 users you support it.

This isn't a developer decision, it's a a business decision.

If you don't support it someone else will.

"Now’s the time. Someone needs to start the ball rolling and just say no."

Lots of us say no to supporting IE6 whenever we can, the problem is the person paying our salaries says we will.

But regardless of that, the sad truth is that developers aren't the ones preventing a full scale cutoff of IE6, it's our users. If the people you are making things for use IE6 then you have to support them.

Developers need to start keeping exceedingly careful track of exactly how much time they spend fighting with IE6 so they can go to the person footing the bill and say "this is how much money you've wasted on a completely obsolete technology".

"Wasted" is totally the wrong attitude. Knowing the support cost is important, but whether it is a waste or a business investment can't be answered by engineers who are programmed to follow the latest shiny thing.

If 60% of my users are on IE6, it is in no way a "waste" for me to spend the money supporting it and calling it a waste highlights an engineers ignorance of the business side of things.

How much of the revenue comes from IE6 browsers? If it's more than the cost support it/ less drop it... My guess, it's less revenue then cost and that by this time next year we can say the same for IE7.

>>In the final week of wrapping up my first legitimate project, my boss dropped the bomb I was hoping to avoid. “Hey, Colby”, he said, “make sure it works in IE6 and up.”

This is the problem. No foresight. A my agency IE 6 support is a very specific line item in our proposals (if it's in there at all) and it adds 30% to the cost of development.

I usually add IE6 support to my sites. I've done it enough that I know what to avoid from the beginning. I can usually make it IE6-compliant without much extra effort, if any. I sympathize with younger devs who don't have that experience and know it must feel like pointless effort for such a small percentage of people.

I gave up on IE6 this year. Feels great.

Now, there's just IE7... and I get the feeling IE8 will feel like IE7 a few years from now. Microsoft really needs to fix their release style for IE. That is the #1 problem, not that the browsers are bad for their time.

I just worked on a 300K project for a company that makes 6mil/day (yes, you read that right) to redo a single page on their website (albeit a functional page). IE6 was a requirement.

A client with that kind of money dictates what is and is not supported and you don't just get to "not know how to do it".

2% of the U.S. may use IE6... but 99% of the executives in this company used it.

Not to mention that if an IE6 hack took 2 days you got of eeeaaasy... seriously. It only took 2 days? You got of easy.

Yeah, it sucks. But there are cases where learning how to IE6 or otherwise can be quite lucrative- and a condition for doing business.

The fact of the matter is, this kid will be dealing with legacy type issues over the next 40-45 years of his career. 10 years from now, devs will be grumbling about supporting some technology we view as common place and whiz-bang today.

Yes, supporting IE6 is a pain in the ass (I have to do it due to my company's huge Chinese user base). But I am watching it die a slow death.

The specific experience sucks, but in general it will help him prepare for realities of web dev.

"make it sure that it works on ie6" is the worst line you can hear at work. especially if you're developing a web app. even global websites like fb don't support ie6 anymore.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp - IE6 has 2.6%, I don't really see a point in spending hours optimizing stuff for it.

As with anything, it's a cost/benefit analysis. If you ran a company that sells a billon dollars of products online per year, would you ask your web developer to spend hours ensuring the site looks and functions decently in IE6 if that means an extra $26 million? I sure as heck would.

On the flip side, if you're short on resources and that time would be better spent adding functionality which would result in > 2.6% return, then by all means ignore IE6.

Linking w3schools for anything web is like linking FOX News for politics. *edit: more info http://w3fools.com/

Didn't know that. What would you suggest as a legit browser stats then?

The problem is that their users are not a representative sampling of the overall browser market since they heavily skew towards web developers. If you are also making a site for web developers, then the w3schools numbers are valid. Otherwise, no.

That's a valid point. Are there any statistics available that you would recommend?

IE is the bane of my existence. It's got a lot easier over the last few years. The original turn from table based design to CSS back in 2005 was hell. It was guaranteed that half of your CSS would NOT work. It's a lot easier now but I still find some really weird issues.

Nowadays I use mogotest.com to help me with it. It's a lot more handy than booting up a VM.

After a few years you find out it's not that hard to support it. Prefer padding instead of margins, be careful with floats, use overflow:hidden to clear blocks, add a sprinkle of zoom:1, and it's done. It won't look exactly the same, but don't sweat it - it just needs to work.

But thank god I usually don't need to do any of this anymore :)

This post was worth the vote just because of the fond memories hacking through browser compatibility issues in the early 2000s. I'd literally cry sometimes, but I suppose it taught valuable lessons about the cost of long-term support, customer satisfaction, and the demands of building a shipping product vs. a nice tech demo.

Part of life as being an employee is learning to deal with things like this. Unfortunately, part of life being a boss/founder/owner is having to ignore all the perfectly reasonable complaints and say do it anyways, because there are business, political, or other reasons it has to be done.

That said, this special taste of hell used to be developing any site, repeated for every browser, back before all these fancy CSS frameworks that did all the hacks for you.

Given all that, I think the OP has the right approach: Sucking up and dealing with it at work, and campaigning on his private site to move onwards and upwards. Has my vote.

Colby needs to go back and challenge the requirement with his boss. Business isn't entirely a top-down process -- if it's not a good idea, it's his duty as an employee to express this. Lots of great ideas and insights come from the most junior people. It's easy to come off as difficult when voicing dissent, so it's important to be thoughtful and constructive.

In this case, it's easy -- just bring Microsoft's own data to the table. According to http://www.ie6countdown.com, only 2% of the US uses IE6, and it's clearly not 2% more work. In addition, big sites like Facebook and YouTube have abandoned IE6 support. The company's needs will differ from the averages, but it's a good starting point to start looking at the data.

IE6 is a necessary evil in some circumstances. You're young - you need to be flexible. Complaining won't help.

Practical steps that could help:

Produce your standards compliant site. Then, to deal with IE quirks:

1. Ensure you've used a resets CSS script - level the ground before you start to build.

2. Serve separate CSS files for IE6/7/8 using conditional comments, which overrides any styling that requires IE specific workarounds.

3. Learn a handful of workarounds to deal with problems you might encounter.

If you follow these three points, IE really won't be so much of a headache.

And remember: [1]

(Follow the principles of progressive enhancement: [2])

[1] http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

I realize you're trying to help. However.

Necessary evil is an "enabling" statement. In my opinion this doesn't help circumstances but only prolongs it.

It's more evil than necessary and it's only necessary because we keep allowing it to be.

The majority of people involved in technology are thinking people. Some of these people are part of large corporations which currently use IE6 because the cost of updating legacy systems is overly prohibitive.

They don't use IE6 because they lack education or intelligence - they're using it because the business case for leaving IE6 behind isn't as strong as the business case for keeping it.

It's not impossible to produce a site which functions well with IE6. Some sites won't need to consider it, but IMO particular types of site (ecommerce for example) must support it, because one single conversion can bring the parent company a lot of money.

If IE6 is a problem for you I suggest you don't venture too far into the world of mobile devices.

Just speaking for me, but I was able to quit supporting IE6 around the time Facebook dropped its support for it. If you have business clients, they want the social and if social media doesn't care about outdated garbage they don't. It saves me and the clients time and money. Reading this guys post did make me smile though, I remember all to well my days in IE6 - good ol' png fix, ah how I miss those shitty gray boxes around all my lovely images.

If having the site IE6 compatible brings in more revenue then whatever they pay you for two days work, then it sounds like a pretty solid investment.

Why, when I was a young programmer we had to write the code in the snow with our pee, and a compiler was just a word for the pilot of the hovering dirigible that read the instructions and passed them to the ALU, which was another fellow with an abacus. They would wrap the results around a rock, and drop it on my house when the program would exit. We had to walk uphill...

Nobody knows how to IE6, that's the point.

Welcome to the club.

I agree most B2C sites need to take IE6 out of the game. Personally, I work for a company that helps American old folks with their healthcare choices. 30% of them still use IE6. You guys need to teach your grandparents to upgrade their browsers so I can stop supporting IE6. D:

This debate is getting really thin. It seems we all live in a world where 5-6% of users are on IE 6. Yet we give this percentage huge leverage in our development efforts. Arguments that "clients are using it on sites/services they pay for" are misguided. What everyone should be doing is developing against forward looking APIs (HTML 5) and shimming to the non-compliant browsers. And for IE 6 in particular we should develop UX that let's the user know they are missing out, with instructions on how to update. It's not about ignoring them or leaving them in the dark - it's about educating them on what they are missing. Just the security aspects alone could prompt a user to update.

For the corporations who still image the desktops and/or make IE 6 standard: stop buying vendor products that require it. Easier said than done I know. But if serious IT groups were serious about saving money and/or standards they'd simply admit that IE 6 is costing them more than an update to their "standard browser".

Although dropping IE6 support is a valid enough plea, "favour progress to backward compatibility" would be the wrong professional lesson to learn for him. The real question ought to be "do your customers require IE6 support and will they be unhappy if you drop it?"

When I was a kid we had to develop websites without firebug/inspector, in IE6, both ways.

Wait, I'm still a kid.

The only sites that should support IE6 are the download pages for the newer browsers.

Me, I say that our apps can't work with IE (yes, IE, including 7 and 8), without a plugin : Google Chrome Frame.

Both the words "plugins" (reminds him of Flash I guess) and "Google" seems reassuring :p Might not work at every company ^^

Google doesn't support IE6 (even if it may work on some of their site without directed effort). Your business makes less money than Google. Applying the transitive property we find...

So Colby... does CSS still make you smile (as you say on http://colbyrabideau.com/)? :)

Funny thing, his site looks broken in Firefox - top menu is out of the screen and page has a horizontal scroll

"School didn't teach me about the real world"

you were 8 years old then IE6 came out. that makes me weep. i remember when ie6 was state of the art! king of the hill!

Even NMCI, the most bloated, antiquated, over-funded network on the planet doesn't use IE6 anymore. Just quit it.

Um, guys, no one supports IE6 anymore. The question is whether we should be supporting IE7 (answer: no).

Buck up.

Supporting IE6 is a necessary rite of passage.

Don't wuss out.

IE what is that? I only know Chrome and Firefox.

forget about compatibility when it comes to playing an audio file in html 5

Oh goodness how I despise Internet Explorer.

try html5boilerplate

Interesting way to finish it off:

Now’s the time. Someone needs to start the ball rolling and just say no.

So really just about anyone but author, then?

That's exactly what I was thinking. He's telling us to stand up and do something he's not willing to do himself?

I think all websites should just ban together and direct IE users to a landing page with download links of the other 3 "superior" browsers or if they must use IE they can download Chrome Plus that lets you open IE tabs. Then on the bottom of the landing page they have a choice of proceeding anyway, with caution of course. If people just saw side-by-side comparisons of how CSS renders in IE and the rest of the conforming browsers people would switch in a heartbeat.

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