Time to Drop IE 6?
I’m curious if anyone has had a chance to drop IE 6? I’d love to get away from it for the redesign of this site, but unfortunately that browser still accounts for 15% of hits here. While the thought of making a statement and redirecting to a “Download Firefox!” page when it’s hit in IE 6 is appealing, I can’t help but think that would be taking the easy way out. For public sites with huge amounts of hits out in the wild it might not be an option of course. For anyone who has gone the >IE6 route, what was your main motivation for doing so, or if you haven’t why not?
Oooh, I’d dearly love to make such a bold move. Internet Explorer 7 still has its quirks, but it’s so much easier to deal with than the old version. Most of the sites and applications that I design are used by government employees, many of whom are stuck with 6. In my opinion, dropping support for IE 6 is too premature at this point. I’d wait another year or two at least.
My logs show the split at 50/50 when comparing IE6 vs. IE7… so yeah- we still have a ways to go… I’m with Geof on this one.
Every time I build a site lately, I try to convince the project manager to let me put a message right across the top of the page for IE6 users that says, “Does this page look bad? That’s because your browser sucks!” but so far they haven’t let me. Sticklers.
The only thing I’ve ventured to drop IE6 support for is my Virb profile. No complaints yet.
Drop IE6? I love the fact that once you install 7 you can’t go back (well, except to have a timebombed image of XP with IE6, in case you want to test).
On the development side, I’d prefer to just drop IE6 in favor of developing for 7 (but I don’t think anyone has that luxury quite yest). On the user side, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say they preferred IE7 to 6, if not for anything else than the seemingly incredibly unintuitive placement of the refresh button.
I’ll drop IE6 once it gets down somewhere below 10%, probably closer to 5%. IE users make up about 31% of my blog’s visitors, with half of that being IE6 (roughly 15% of total visitors).
I hope you are not thinking about redesigning this site. It is one of the best designs I’ve seen in a while!
@Geoff
True, don’t have that kind of opportunity with that kind of work. Hopefully in 2 years IE 6 will lose enough market share to put it out of contention. I suppose it still depends on the audience, but even now there aren’t too many places that require 5.5 with it’s 1% market share.
@Joseph Labrecque
Same percentages on my blog here too. Luckily FF counts for more than 50% though.
@NatalieMac
Good place for it. I was considering even forwarding the user to a page with information about firefox/ie7 with instructions on upgrading. Seems the only people who haven’t either 1) don’t know how, 2) have pirated windows and can’t or 3) are web developers that need it for testing.
@Sammy Larbi
Seems like all the new MS products are really lacking in the user experience department. I was looking for “Save As…” on Office 2007 and to my surprise it in the upper left corner icon instead of accessible from a menu. It’s like they said “hey, other aps use this for the move/resize/close menu — lets make this the main menu of our application to confuse people!”
@Josh
Sounds reasonable. At the rate IE7 is growing, and with Vista now out wonder if it’ll be down to there by next summer.
@Aaron Roberson
Thanks! It’s a wordpress template of course, but I love how with this one you can modify what shows up on each and every page — like related posts and such. Either way I’d want to keep it clean and banner free.
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