Does IE6 *Still* Matter? | Hacker News Reader

Does IE6 Still Matter?

advice.cio.com

11 pointsnreece18 comments

I'm sick of seeming posts like this. No one else can tell you if IE matters to your site. You (I hope) have statistics on who uses your site you can see if a significant part of your community uses IE6. If it's less than 10% maybe you could consider running an upgrade message, if it isn't suck it up.

Posts like this that try to generalise the web together are nonsense. They can suggest trends, but then Yahoo still supports IE6 and they have a pretty large % of the web using Yahoo.com.

Mostly it seems like a bunch of people moaning because Web development is hard. That's true. IE6 does not make me happy, that's not an excuse to shaft users. If CIO magazine can give CIOs a compelling reason to upgrade all their legacy machines, now that is something I'd like to read about.

> "IE6 does not make me happy, that's not an excuse to shaft users."

Sure it is. It's called ROI and the ROI for supporting IE6 is terrible. You could easily spend your time supporting IE6 and instead spend it on usability tests to better support different user demographics. Users are more than browsers.

As a developer of an open source bugtracker [1], I'd say without hesitation that IE6, to the pain of my fingers and eyeballs, does still matter. I can't tell you how much pain and frustration I'm going through right now trying to make even stupid things work across all browsers, and it seems every time I think I've fixed something, a swarm of IE6 users creep out of the woodwork and tell me just how wrong I am....

/me cries

This question discomforts me coming from somewhere like 'cio'.com. To reiterate what I know most will say, IE6 still holds 1/5th of the browser share.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Sadly, yes, unless your site is aimed solely at technologically savvy users. Or even technologically awake users.

Sad as it is, most sources indicate that IE still has 70-75% of the browser market share overall, and ~40% of IE users are still on IE6. So roughly 30% of the web browsing market is on IE6, which is a rather large subset to simply ignore.

Like it or not (and none of us do), the bulk of sites out there are stuck with supporting IE6 for the near future.

At the Washington Post we have a lot of visitors from corporate/government environments that have locked-down machines that still run IE6, so we see it more than the web average (sorry, can't be more specific). I love the graph of browsers over time, though, you can spot weekends because IE6 usage plummets and IE7/FF/Saf usage all jump.

We put together some special homepage layouts to display as election results started coming in. IE6 hated one of them (the expanding box bug) -- the main developer spent around 8h struggling with it and two of us joined into to help around midnight Monday. Took us another 90m to get it working cross-browser. In other words, I can't wait for IE6 to die.

About 25% of Internet users run IE6, representing more than all Firefox versions (assuming you trust anyone's Web browser statistics)... well, that's not small change.

Does IE6 Still Matter?

For a hobby, it's up to you.

For a business, only if you want to remain a business.

I'd say hobbyists have a positive moral obligation to do what commerce can't: break the web so badly for IE6 that even the most teeth-gritted Luddite finally gives up and upgrades.

> For a business, only if you want to remain a business.

Untrue. Disregarding IE6 at say, 20%, implies that you only consider 80% of web users your target market. There's nothing wrong with that.

I think the answer is yes, but I've also seen some companies dropping support for IE6.

That been said I was fortunate enough to be able to release a website that was functional in IE6. But didn't include the "fancy" effects and opaque backgrounds that the other browsers supported.

And my startup's administrative interface which is used by my clients doesn't support IE6 whilst the front end for the end-users does.

honestly I think at this point this is a mutual bad relationship. Websites adapt themselves to IE6 because thats what corporate types use. And corporate types don't upgrade, because they have no reason to do so, since websites can be run with IE6.

For one of my blogs, we got fed up with IE6 compatibility... so we just made a little javascript that would forward users of IE6 to a page with screenshots of our site and a little "Dude, upgrade your browser."

This was for a corporate blog, mind you.

Tech late adopters are often better sources of revenue for ecommerce sites - they have more disposal income, pirate less, etc. "Let the unwashed masses suffer for their ignorance" loses a lot of business if your goal is to sell something.

> Tech late adopters are often better sources of revenue for ecommerce sites - they have more disposal income, pirate less, etc.

I'd think early adopters have more disposable income. Those gadgets don't come cheap you know. iPods were $AU800 when I first got one.

Also, tech late adopters may have greater trust issues with buying items over the internet, particularly from companies they haven't heard of.

I think you can afford to worry less about CSS and other sorts of compatibilities at this point. Still important to make sure javascript doesn't break.

unfortunately..yes.

yes.

The presumption was that it ever did. Popular at one time, sure, but "matter"?

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