Age old argument isnt it? When should you stop supporting a browser that is outdated? Ok so I know the majority of the time outdated is subjective – but lets face it – Im pretty sure that there isnt one person on the face of this earth that doesnt think think IE6 is outdated.
But what is outdated really? Old? Undersupported? Dwindling numbers?
When working for a web development agency – everything was based on the W3C stats, once a particular metric fell below 10% then it was officially unsupported. I was there to see the fall of 800 x 600 to below 10% and welcomed the chance to be able to build sites at 1000px width (well 960px but thats just getting petty).
So ignoring the W3C stats and looking at our own sites I can see that there is still a shocking large number of people using IE6:
Percentage using various versions of Internet explorer (of a total percentage of 34%)
|
|
| 1. | 1,786 | 52.44% | |
| 2. | 983 | 28.86% | |
| 3. | 635 | 18.64% | |
| 4. | 1 | 0.03% | |
| 5. | 1 | 0.03% |
As you can see – that is still a large percentage of people (18% of 34%) using IE6 – that on this site equates to about 2000 customers.
2000! If 2000 of these customers could not access the site or use it correctly – regardless of how morally you want stand on this – your client is going to be pissed!
Other sites of ours show pretty much similar numbers – which to be frank scares me somewhat
So what can you do? We by default now put a nag screen on all of our sites saying something along the lines of “The browser you are using is outdated and as such tis site might not display correctly” but we at no time disallow them access to the site. Yes it is a ball ache trying to get the site looking half decent in IE6 – but I know that im not the only developer going through this trouble.
So the answer to the original question is No – you shouldnt. You can try and talk about the demographics of your customer base but take this example above for instance. It is a site selling digital downloads to people who will ALL be interested in music production – that includes having the best most powerful computer, the best equiptment and lets face it the majority of them are likely to be huge computer nerds. Yet there is still that massive percentage of them using IE6. You have to bear in mind that companies often roll out stuff like citrix complete with IE6 or might have a standard desktop that only includes IE6. Either way if you deny these people access then you are going to be losing that number of sales each month.
Dan
