can we stop coding for IE6 yet?

[SooTyLaD]

hi guys,

i dunno about you lot, but IE6 can really take the fun out of web design for me... i'm not going to turn it into a rant cuz i know we all feel the same way but do you reckon we're anywhere near a point yet where we can just sod it off?

i have a way i like to code, and i hate having to use dirty little code hacks and the like just to get it to work in IE6, i reckon all the worlds web designers should make a pact never to to do IE6 cross-browser coding ever again and people will soon pop IE7 on when they realise that sites look all messed up...

what you reckon

 

[SooTyLaD]

got the stats now to help the discussion:

March 2008

IE7: 21.9%
IE6: 30.1%
IE5: 1.1%
Firefox: 37.0%
Mozilla: 1.1%
Safari: 2.1%
Opera: 1.4%

Firefox is now the global majority apparently (these stats taken from w3schools), which is great - extending my question from above, what percentage do you feel will be acceptable to start ignoring IE6?

i reckon we stick it out till it hits 30%

 

[SooTyLaD]

I agree, as a web designer and builder myself, at least 70% of the serious rendering errors we encounter whilst writing a site are on IE6. I think we spend a greater effort fixing IE6 than writing it in the first place!
The problem we have, as a company, is that some of our larger clientèle only use IE6, because moving over to IE7 would cause them problems. So for now we just have to keep coding for IE6 for them, but maybe some of our new sites will only be IE7.
Programming on a Mac ( \o/ ) makes it somewhat problematic as we have to upload it onto our test servers and RDC into it, as apposed to being able to run it locally, but that's another story altogether.

I'm also on a mac matey, and i have VMWare Fusion installed just so it can run IE7 & IE6 for testing

 

[SooTyLaD]

i said that cuz those stats indicated that firefox was a higher percent than the rest... i wasn't mixing IE6 & 7 together cuz the're very different kettles of fish... i'm happy to code for the minor differences with 7 its 6 where my quarrel is...

the stats from w3schools maybe wrong and those wiki ones right, but i hope not... then again, it doesn't split 6/7 which is the interesting bit...

 

[SooTyLaD]

what statistics software is that?

 

[SooTyLaD]

If it's a hobby site, definitely forget IE6 users. I'd even encourage you to put some kind of notice up saying "Internet Explorer 6 is nearly 7 years old. It is not supported at this website. You must upgrade to a recent web browser, such as Internet Explorer 7, to use this website".

But if it's a commercial site, don't forget them. You need all the visitors you can get.

i think thats a very good way of looking at it, but hopefully we're not that far away from scrapping IE6 completely.