can we stop coding for IE6 yet?

SooTyLaD

SooTyLaD

SooTyLaD

Soldato
Joined
19 Oct 2002
Posts
3,480
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 :p
 
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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% :D:D
 
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/ :p ) 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.
 
knowledge123 said:
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/ :p ) 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.
Click to expand...
I'm also on a mac matey, and i have VMWare Fusion installed just so it can run IE7 & IE6 for testing :rolleyes:
 
QuiKsiLVeR said:
I'm also on a mac matey, and i have VMWare Fusion installed just so it can run IE7 & IE6 for testing :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I wonder what % of those usage figures are corporations IS departments ?
I also wonder what will happen when (eventually) XP becomes obsolete, and Microsoft stop supporting it, i wonder if that will have any bearing on the situation~

edit: lots of wondering atm! :p
 
QuiKsiLVeR said:
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% :D:D
Click to expand...

Are these stats just for the w3schools website?
 
I think they are, they're wrong.. anyway. The data coming from a web designer's site is going to be distorted.

Don't know why the OP is saying "Firefox is now the global majority", when the figures he posted clearly show IE is still the global majority.

400px-Usage_WebBrowsers_Chart.png


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#TheCounter.com
 
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...
 
JimpsEd said:
I think they are, they're wrong.. anyway. The data coming from a web designer's site is going to be distorted.

Don't know why the OP is saying "Firefox is now the global majority", when the figures he posted clearly show IE is still the global majority.
Click to expand...
Global majority over certain forms of IE, your pie chart represents IE6 and IE7 together, but designing for IE7 is much less of a ballache than conditional comments and restructures for IE6, which now only has a 30.1% market share, greatly reduced, due to many people upgrading to IE7.

:)
 
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.
 
furnace said:
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.
Click to expand...
i think thats a very good way of looking at it, but hopefully we're not that far away from scrapping IE6 completely.
 
Personally, I'd make it cross browser compatible (IE6, 7, FF, Opera and Safari) regardless of if it's a personal site or for a paid client. It can sometimes be annoying but who are we to tell the people what to use? Not to mention that there are probably more people still using IE6 than there are using FF.

Most people just stopped worrying about IE5.5 compatibility. I think it will be at least a couple more years before we can forget IE6 completely.
 
Many corporates are still on W2K so cannot use IE7 even if they wanted to. My own IT dept is upgrading :rolleyes: us to XP but making us stay on IE6!
 
As said, if it's for your personal site sure drop support for whatever browsers you want - if it's for a commercial site you definitely need to support IE 6.0 and I'd say you will need to continue to do so for at least 2-3 years.

We've only recently (within the last 6 months) stopped supporting IE 5/5.5 when the global-stats for our 75-100 commercial sites dropped below 1%. If you use a proper doctype to prevent IE 6 from falling into quirks mode I personally rarely get many problems with it apart from the double-margin bug gets me sometimes. IE 6.0 is a dream compared to the botched box-model of IE 5.0 :p
 
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At work we target SME businesses of various levels of technical ability. w3school's stats are very scewed towards techies.

browsers.JPG


akakjs
 
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