Ask HN: Should I care to support IE6?

4 points·satyajit··6 comments

According to the latest browser statistics (link below), the IE6 has a 17.1 market share. How many of those folks may care about the Web2.0 platform we are writing? May be about a fifth? So overall for those 2-3% of the entire market, is it worth spending your valuable cycle, which you would rather spend on features of your site. (also save on Tylenol expenses)

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You have no idea if a fifth of IE6 users will use your products: for all you know they could all use it.

My advice: support IE6 entirely, launch, iterate, then once you have users (= market) then make the choice to scale back IE6 development.

As a young startup you'll have plenty of reasons why users won't stick - don't make browser support (eg, something you can fix and are aware of) another reason.

Good advice. I would suggest that the OP also encourage users running IE6 to upgrade.

You might want to take a look at the IE6 Update code (http://ie6update.com/) for ideas.

If it's easy, dedicate a little code to give them a reasonable experience. But any substantial effort in that arena would be a waste of time: Focus instead on creating a great product that will bring forth a few more people who use updated browsers.

As a data point, we see 53% of our traffic from some flavor of IE with a breakdown (for IE) of:

IE-6 / IE-7 / IE-8

39% / 55% / 6%

For us, this sadly means that supporting IE-6 is mandatory.

Browser statistics link: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

From w3schools : "our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files"

And as they say : "W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user."

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