Things We’ll Be Able To Do Once IE6 Is Dead | Hacker News Reader

Things We’ll Be Able To Do Once IE6 Is Dead

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23 pointspeter12313 comments

Contrary to the article inline-block on inline attributes is supported by IE6 according to the Quirksmode tables (http://www.quirksmode.org/css/display.html); unsurprising as it was originally a non-standard IE-specific attribute. Firefox 2 was the browser everyone was waiting for in order to use it.

We'll have to wait until IE7 dies until we can forget about the hasLayout problem, sadly. (http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html)

I think IE7 users will upgrade faster than IE6 users for these reasons:

1. The quick release between IE7 and IE8 means that users who have recently upgraded (or have adjusted) to IE7 haven't got stuck in their ways just yet and have recently encountered change.

2. IE7 users have already (tended) to show a willingness to upgrade and learn a new system (either Vista or IE7 on XP).

3. IE8 is being rolled out as a critical update so the willingness and recent experience of change should influence IE7 users more than IE6 users.

4. A major reason for not upgrading IE6 is legacy code written for IE6 - this should be less of an issue on IE7.

5. IE8 isn't nearly as different from IE7 as IE7 is from IE6.

Or, "10 cool things you can do right now because you no longer support IE6."

Sadly, Firefox 2 isn't dead (and apparently still accounts for 40% of Firefox usage), so inline-block is even further-away than the death of IE6. I recently had to take out a bundle of inline-blocks I had put in for a client's intranet site after finding out that they wouldn't even consider updating past 2.0.0.20. Why go through the major effort of transitioning to a new browser and then doing QA and testing for all your existing web-apps, but then not put in the small amount of effort involved in keeping said browser up-to-date? I've never seen a single site, no matter how complex, break on a Firefox upgrade.

Agreed, but Firefox 3 is quite different from Firefox 2 in terms of interface etc. and there are some quirks (such as the awesome bar) that at least among the people I talk to got quite a bad rap to start with.

Now if only Firefox 2 and 3 weren't such resource hogs, at least on my system, they're constantly soaking up memory.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong ;)

Not sure where you're getting your 40% number, but my sites see less than 3% of users using FF2 (these are sites which still see 20%+ IE6 use, so not skewed towards developers).

This stats page shows FF2 use at 3% of total, which would be around 7% of Firefox users. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_firefox.asp

If you're curious, I got my stat from here: http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

It's only one data point, but I have a few popularish (for the niche) sites in the (Ruby) programming niche, and averaged over a few sites, over about a million pageviews over the last several months, about 2.5% of visitors were using IE 6. From others I've spoken to, this is about average for techie / programming sites.

So.. if I didn't want to support it, I wouldn't. Well, I would, but I'd just show bare styling to them. The sort of user who's still on IE 6 doesn't really care about pixel perfect layout anyway, right? (Except for the poor closet geeks "stuck" on IE 6 in the workplace, but that's an even smaller percentage.)

I though it was getting to a point now where IE6 support was more for intranet and business sites. Is it a case of everyone supports it because everyone supports it, or people still use IE6 because it's supported?

Anecdote: The mother of a friend still used it (until recently when I updated her browser manually). She just did not want to fiddle with her computer and did not care.

Does Windows normally offer to upgrade IE automatically?

I am starting to come to the conclusion that all the downsides of not supporting IE6 are for the most part mythological (particularly outside of corporate intranet situations like you identify).

I mean, if you "don't support" IE6, what is the worst thing that happens? Some stuff doesn't look right for a portion of your audience? These people already have a seriously degraded internet experience, are they going to notice that the padding on your floats is all messed up?

I am pretty certain that you are leaving revenue on the table if you choose to ignore IE6 as a business, which is a valid objection to my argument. But how much?

And how much costs are you leaving off the table by freeing your designers and developers from supporting IE6, and allowing them to do other amazing things with their precious time?

Give me two almost-identical websites with two similar, business-oriented audiences, then have one site support IE6 and the other basically ignore it (and use the excess development/design time to build other features). I don't know about you, but I'd put my money in #2.

The problem is when you use CSS for interface elements (such as dialog boxes, UI controls, etc), a broken IE6 implementation may mean those users can't use the site at all.

How relevant this is to your income, of course, depends on the site. For a blog, it may not matter at all, but there's a good reason why Facebook is notifying IE6 users of a degraded experience. They use a ton of CSS/Javascript for their UI, and I'm sure the cost of supporting IE6 is very measurable and very high. But they probably can't just tell IE6 users to go away entirely.

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