The importance of supporting IE6
by Mike Badgley on July 13, 2009
What appears to a growing trend is the moving away from IE6 to support more modern browsers only. It seems to make sense – after all, the browser is about eight years old. I mean, how many of us have the same car for eight years, let alone a Web browser? But the statistics bear out that there are still a number of users who are continue to surf with this outdated clunker.
In a recent post on the Digg blog, Mark Trammell took a look at the number of IE6 users who were active on their site, and in a poll that they ran, they found some interesting results as to why these users continue using IE6 as their Web browser of choice.
This photo is the property of Digg™
Interesting how only 24% of IE6 users use this browser by choice – the rest are at the mercy of their system administrator.
It bugs me when I see Web developers who decry the need to support IE6 and either stop completely or offer up a “graceful degradation” (or in other words an ugly version) of the site.
Supporting IE6, in my opinion, is not a hard thing to do. Sure, I’ve spent a lot of extra time ironing out display bugs that affected that browser only, but on the whole I find its fairly easy to offer up a site that’s a replica of what you would see in a modern browser. To me its just Web guys getting lazy – sick of having to spend the extra time to make the site work in IE6. If we took that kind of attitude for users who have speech-assisted browsers, what kind of experience would they have?
Its important to give the best user experience possible – whether that be in IE6 or IE8, especially when the numbers show that the demand is there!
One comment
I would surmise that for every developer that is too lazy to code and/or test for IE6, there’s a sysadmin in a server room somewhere too busy surfing Facebook to think about how his company is going to evolve their browser standard. Laziness, with a dash of ignorance on both parties.
by DisgruntledDeveloper on July 14, 2009 at 7:58 am. #