Us designers love a good rant about IE6. And why not? Everything looks perfect in Firefox, Safari, even IE7 and 8. Then you open up IE6 and everything is a mess. In an ideal world no one would use IE6 anymore (and all browsers would render websites the same way).
But at the same time I do get sick of IE6 rants and campaigns. This isn’t a rant, it’s more of a ‘be aware that it still exists and some reasons why it still exists‘ post. A recent blog post of mine researching popular design blog analytics showed that there are still 3% of users using IE6. And that’s in the field of design. There is more than likely a lot more than that in terms of the World Wide Web.
Why people are still using IE6
- They use a company computer and have no control over upgrades
- They’ve popped into an Internet cafe and have to use what’s available
- It works for them so why change
- They don’t realise there are other browsers available
- They like it
So rather than campaigning to get people to upgrade their browser, shouldn’t we just deal with it and support it?
But what does ’support’ mean?
I think Andy Clarke hits the nail on the head in his killer contract:
We will also test to ensure that pages will display visually in a ‘similar’, albeit not necessarily an identical way, in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 for Windows as this browser is now past it’s sell-by date.
I think this is the best way to support IE6: it doesn’t have to be pixel perfect but the content should be accessible and it should look similar.
What I’ll usually do before launching a site is check to make sure all the links are visible and clickable and all the content is accessible in IE6. I’ll even spend 30 minutes to make sure it looks ‘half decent’ with regards to IE6 not supporting PNG transparency, which involves replacing the PNG backgrounds with GIFs via an IE6 specific stylesheet.
Supporting IE6
To specifically target IE6 users with special instructions or styles, use the following code.
<!--[if IE 6]>
Special instructions for IE 6 here, usually including a specific IE6 stylesheet
<![endif]-->Anything placed between the special tags will only be recognised by IE6.
Interesting IE6 campaigns
Bring down IE6
Dear IE6
IE6 Update
Save IE6
Universal IE6 css
Help with common IE6 problems
- IE6 bugs that will get you every time
- Free tools to make IE6 bug testing easy
- 10 fixes for IE6 problems
Do you support IE6?
Hopefully over the next year or two we will be seeing less and less of IE6, especially if Microsoft encourage users to upgrade to IE8.
Do you ’support’ IE6? Do you check to make sure your sites work? Do you spend much time fixing it or making it pixel perfect?
June 29th, 2009
theodin says:
great article as ever lee. I had some thoughts on this myself
http://bit.ly/t4omt
My personal view is to price IE6 into any freelance website build. Make a client aware of old browser support and offer the solution, but price the work accordingly.
June 29th, 2009
Adam Lunn says:
Interesting read Lee, but I do think that more awareness is needed to show that the browser is very much out of date. An interesting quote though from the Dear IE6 site:
“thank you for all the money you’ve made me. Countless hours of debugging, all paid!”
Seems like there are 2 sides to this debate after all…
June 29th, 2009
Andrew Rossborough says:
I’m with you Lee, and we seem to be in the minority when I read of countless designers ignoring ie6 because it’s “archaeic” or “past its sell by date”.
The fact is a large percentage of visitors to our site use ie6, for whatever reason, and we’re a design company. How much higher percentage would that be for a site that doesn’t get regular visits from the “design community” and their 30″ imacs?
We’re losing business if we’re snotty about it and say “if you’re using ie6 you don’t deserve to see our site”. We’ll continue to support ie6 as best we can but always warn clients that it is likely to display differently. They always seem to respect that.
I was going to blog on this myself actually but I think that rant might have got it out of my system!
June 29th, 2009
James says:
w3schools browser stats still show a 14.5% share of the market for IE6. As designers we cannot justify excluding nearly 15% (or higher depending on sector) of potential users because it is an inconvenience to us. If you do choose to justify that, do you also disregard accessibility standards – afterall, blind people make up far less than 15% of internet users and it is at least as big a job to cater to the disabled as it is to optimise for IE6.
I agree that sometimes you have to accept that your site isn’t going to display perfectly in every browser, but you should still give it a good try before writing it off as a bad job.
And besides, a shared hatred of IE6 brings the community closer together; if you ever find yourself strapped for an ice breaker at a web designer get together, just bring up IE6 and you’re away.
June 29th, 2009
Sean Delaney says:
This was a nice read Lee.
I design for Firefox on a Mac. I also use the YUI library files; reset.css and base.css to neuralise browser specific rules for all Class-A browsers.
This allows my designs to render correctly in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE7, IE8 and Opera on both Mac and Windows. However, for IE6 I will check my designs but I will not spend any time adding hacks, fixing problems. I have recently decided to start using a Print Stylesheet for IE6 users with a message explaining about the issues with IE6, encouraging the user to upgrade with a list of FREE alternatives.
My traffic stats for June so far shows that I have 6% of visitors still using IE6. In May I had 8%. I believe this drop was due to the ongoing campaign informing IE6 users to upgrade.
Sean
June 29th, 2009
Leon says:
Yes, the key is that some people *can’t* change their browser. It obviously depends on the site’s visitors. So campaigns that try to *make* visitors change will often be counter-productive.
As long as the site renders properly and looks something like the ‘modern’ browser version I can’t see a problem with that. Most of the IE6 ‘quirks’ are quite easy to iron out anyway: if you know you’re designing for IE6 as well from the beginning it shouldn’t cause a problem.
June 29th, 2009
Matt Hill says:
Web developers and designers (with our big screens and up-to-date systems) are a tiny, tiny percentage of the global web audience. What we might think about an outdated browser is a complete irrelevance to average users. They just want a website that works with the kit they’ve currently got.
Current stats put the global number of users of IE6 as anything between 14.5% and 33% (w3schools and thecounter respectively). Look at all the screenshots that the BBC have of the Wimbledon website: all in IE6. We should pay heed to the numbers of users who simply can’t upgrade.
It’s true IE6 is a poor browser by today’s standards, and I’d love to ignore it if I could. But I do my job and support it because, well, it’s my job and anything else is a disservice both to my craft and my users.
It’s not my place to tell people what browser they should use and even if I could encourage them to ditch IE6, many are unable to as you point out.
If you believe in an open web, a level playing field and are a responsible designer who cares about his craft, then you have no option but to cater for IE6 in some way.
I think Andy Clarke went too far with his global IE6 stylesheet approach — very few clients will be prepared for anything that radical, whatever way you spin it.
For me, I make sure my sites are usable and reasonably similar in design and layout in IE6. Pixel perfection isn’t required; Progressive Enhancement is a better prospect.
June 29th, 2009
Tim Marshall says:
As much as supporting IE6 is a pain the browser does still have a significant enough market share to warrant support in some form.
I support IE6 but firmly believe graceful degradation is the way forward and don’t try and make it look identical to more better supported browsers.
Because of corporate IT policies and non computer literate people still using IE6 it will probably still need supporting for a while yet, maybe Windows 7 will bring with it a whole host of aged computers being upgraded finally and the market share of IE6 will reduce. The fact that no version of IE will ship with Windows 7 in Europe is good thing too, hopefully those that aren’t aware of the existence of other browsers will finally see they have a choice. Assuming of course they even know what a browser is
.
June 29th, 2009
Dorothy says:
I find that most of the common problems in IE6 are easily solved. The main one is the double margin and I wrote a fix for this on my blog this morning when I saw your post: http://dotwebs.com/blog/index.php/2009/06/ie-6-double-margin-fix/
Using dynamic scripts that degrade well or offering alternative versions for IE6 and older is always good practise. I certainly don’t think that designers should stop supporting it. A major part of website design is accessibility and it is not that difficult to achieve.
June 29th, 2009
Chris Colhoun says:
I totally agree with your approach to IE6, it should not be ignored.
A lot of people who rant about IE6 are not that fully aware of the bugs and what causes them. I think if your aware of the bugs you can take it into consideration when building so that you can avoid as many errors as possible.
Personally, I am still learning about all the various bugs so more than likely my sites up until now will break in IE6 but hopefully I can fix that in later builds until we finally drop IE6.
June 29th, 2009
Lee says:
@Theodin: Interesting approach telling the client and then charging extra. How do you estimate for this? e.g. do you say an extra day? (from which you could make a good few extra bucks
@Adam: Possibly if all the major sites agreed to have a specific ‘upgrade your browser’ stylesheet for ie6 but the problem is it’s only us designers that really seem to care (cos it makes life awkward for us).
@Andrew: lol true, it is a bit snotty. And you don’t know their situation. I’d be pissed if I was traveling and had to use a internet cafe or kiosk and I couldn’t get onto the site I wanted to because the designers trying to be smart
@James: ha, I’ll use that as my next ice breaker “so what about ie6?”
@Sean: That 2% drop is interesting – so it does seem to make a difference then?
@Leon: “Yes, the key is that some people *can’t* change their browser.” Exactly, although a lot of designers don’t realise this
@Matt: BBC using IE6 screen shots for Wimbledon, seriously? Yeah I think Andy Clarke’s global stylesheet is too much. I can’t imagine selling that to a client and wouldn’t want any of my sites (unless it was a quirky site for designers only) looking that basic
@Tim: “no version of IE will ship with Windows 7 in Europe” it will be interesting to see how this affects browser wars. Curious, is this the same in the US?
@Dorothy: Nice one! http://dotwebs.com/blog/index.php/2009/06/ie-6-double-margin-fix/
@Chris: Am always coming across new bugs myself and scratching my head
June 29th, 2009
Janko says:
“We will also test to ensure that pages will display visually in a ‘similar’, albeit not necessarily an identical way, in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 for Windows as this browser is now past it’s sell-by date.”
Exactly. Web applications and sites should be fully functional in IE6 but they can have limited visual appearance and effects. That can be acceptable for the most of the clients.
June 29th, 2009
Steve Cousins says:
One of the major reasons for people using IE6 it that a lot of people (especially in the public sector) are still running on Windows 2000 and there is no upgrade to IE7 and above.
I’m still having to support it and usually resort to degrading gracefully, in fact one of my sites currently has 30.20% of traffic from IE6, so although it’s a pain in the a$$ unfortunately we still owe it to these users to present something that’s at least functional.
With a bit of luck this will rapidly change with the release of Win7 as a lot of users have been reluctant to upgrade (?) to Vista. Fingers crossed!
June 30th, 2009
Louis says:
Interestingly, the website “Save The Developers” is no longer available. The .com version goes to Micrsoft’s IE8 web page and the .org version is a GoDaddy domain holder. Strange.
June 30th, 2009
Clinton says:
Graceful Degradation, No Extra Cost to clients, Conditional Comments and Let nature take it’s course..use what the modern browsers can support.
June 30th, 2009
Evan says:
Some sites I am responsible for still see ie6 at > 25% market share so I can’t ignore it yet.
I usually just don’t bother to make some of the enhancements and visual stuff work fully on ie6 I just disable it for ie6. The pages still function and render fine in ie6 though.
I would like to eventually convince a client to let me put up a nag screen to recommend a browser update.
July 1st, 2009
Anonymous says:
Simple put: F*** Microsoft. It’s their fault. They should have made IE7 and IE8 mandatory forced updates long ago.
July 1st, 2009
sunil says:
I wrote something like this in my blog. How we can handle this much browsers. If we support this much browsers, we need to use css filters or a lot of javascripts. better to leave the old browsers. Do we really need to support Internet Explorer(6)? http://www.myhtmlworld.com/web-development/do-we-really-need-to-support-internet-explorer-6.html
July 1st, 2009
cheekylele says:
the unfortunate reality with some of my clients is that they are so old school they are part of that small percentage who still use IE6 – i constantly think: you poor sods! lol
I educate my clients because I tell them the CMS backend “works best in firefox, safari or chrome” – its the truth!
it comes down to a case of quality control and how far you are willing to go for your client. because I am aware that the majority of company networks in my country are still using XP/IE6 its become a given that we do the utmost to support the browser
i hate ie6.css but then i’d hate it even more if i “made” a broken site for the world to see
fussiness comes at a price but you can reap the rewards in other ways
July 1st, 2009
jhoysi says:
Support for IE6 is necessary at this stage, and will be so for years, unfortunately. Company Intranets were largely built to ONLY support IE6. Therefore, the majority of browsing done during “business hours” (which, if you have a global market, are 24 hours a day) is done with IE6.
Support truly can not be dropped until these Intranets are upgraded to work with modern browsers. Unless your online target doesn’t include anyone who could be in an office with an Intranet, IE 6 will need to be supported.
July 1st, 2009
jhoysi says:
While it sounds wonderful, I would like to add charging extra for IE 6 support feels like a knee-jerk response. The client can not help the browsers their market needs to support, and it is not superfluous of them to support a browser that is likely utilized by the majority of their target.
Charging extra for widely unsupported browsers at the client’s request is one thing, but support for a browser that, while outdated, is in fact widely supported and used is not the answer IMO.
July 2nd, 2009
Warfang says:
Coding websites to work in IE6 is a good practice, but the developer shouldn’t feel forced to make the page look identical in modern browsers. This is slowing the advancement of the internet down. You should not have to sacrifice elements in your design because of 15% of the internet — whether they choose to be in that group or not.
As long as it looks decent and functions well in IE6, you’re good. After that, raise awareness about the obsolete browser by incorporating something like this into your website: http://ie6update.com/#.
Really, it’s Microsoft’s responsibility to do that, but it looks like they’re fine with wasting the time and money of web developers everywhere by making us have to use workarounds for the every flaw of IE6.
If we do not cry out to the IE users out there, many will remain oblivious that two major versions (with major improvements) have been released since 6. They will continue to browse, unaware that more hours than need-be went into making the websites that they look at every day work just for them.
IE6 needs to die, and the quicker it does, the better.
July 2nd, 2009
Matt Hill says:
@Warfang: ie6update is a really horrible “solution” to a non-problem. It’s one of the worst ways of “educating” people, by masquerading as a deceitful system message and is no better than nagware.
There have been a lot of discussions about this recently and the done21 guys who implemented it don’t feel there’s anything wrong with it, but I have to disagree.
Websites should be built for PEOPLE, not BROWSERS.
There’s a long conversation about it on my blog:
http://www.friskdesign.com/2009/04/21/why-ie6update-is-wrong/
July 2nd, 2009
Jay says:
Through polling my users, I was able to make the decision that for my main (and personal) site.. due to the majority of the percentages of hits coming from the workplace and educational environments.. that IE6 will get it’s own stripped down stylesheet that does not resemble the look of the site.
This means faster and more discrete viewing when the user is away from home, and then when they get back to Firefox/Safari/Chrome (like the majority of my users’ choose), they’ll have the full glory of my awful designing.
Trying to turn a negative into a positive!
July 2nd, 2009
Matt Hill says:
Here’s a tip for those complaining about IE6: Suck it up and learn how to fix the display problems, most of them are listed here:
http://www.positioniseverything.net/ie-primer.html
http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html
Once you know these, it’s actually very quick and easy to fix up most site’s CSS. As a result, I’ve never understood this whining about “It takes so long to fix IE6!” It doesn’t at all. Really.
July 3rd, 2009
Lee says:
@Steve: You’re right, public sector are always way behind with updates (probably because it takes so long and costs so much to upgrade)
@Sunil: Thanks for the link
@Warfang @Matt: Nice post Matt http://www.friskdesign.com/2009/04/21/why-ie6update-is-wrong/
It raises some interesting points. I have to admit though, when I first seen ie6update I thought “Ha! Very good” but after reading your post I can see the other side of things. Do you know any (popular) sites that are using it?
@Matt: Yeah I do find that I maybe have to spend 1 hour max to fix ie6, and more recently even less as you get used to the problems. It’s just an inconvenience. Those links are helpful though
http://www.positioniseverything.net/ie-primer.html
http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html
July 4th, 2009
Clinton says:
I’ve added a post the my blog continuing this theme, with a few of my own opinions…
http://blog.clintonbeattie.com/ie6-who-cares/
July 7th, 2009
Phil says:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com
I use this site for checking up on browser trending, seems to be down at the moment stats wise but it’s quite helpful. Last check showed that ~18% market share still uses IE6 – that’s not a number I want to alienate!
July 7th, 2009
Matt Hill says:
@Lee: I don’t know what sites are using ie6update, but judging from the bandwagon comments on Twitter, more and more developers are adding it to their sites.
I find it kind of funny actually. Adding that script to a bunch of random sites is hardly a sensible way to “solve” the “problem”.
July 7th, 2009
Matt Hill says:
Interestingly, I asked the guys at ie6update on how they were measuring its success: without empirical evidence that shows if users are acting on the upgrade warning, their approach is pretty pointless anyway.
I didn’t get a useful response and the conversation appears to have died.
July 9th, 2009
Webprogrammierung says:
IE6 is still living. I check my pages that all functions and CSS Layouts are working for IE6. Many users still have this browser installed. Maybe in a 1-2 years IE6 can be ignored.
July 10th, 2009
ozzysong says:
I don’t support it since the official IE8 release.
I’m using the ie6update script and I think the best thing we can do is to inform the user that the browser is shitty and he must update to the last version or inform their sys admin that they’re using an eight years old browser.
July 21st, 2009
craig says:
Just think about this: “I love Youtube, but they don’t support IE6 anymore, I will not wait until they support IE6 again, I will download FF right now to see my favorite video. I don’t dare to boycott youtube, its my fault didn’t update my browser, I’m gonna do whatever they tell me to do in order to use the website again.”
I am a developer I stopped supporting that damn thing for about 6 months, I use a script to tell PEOPLE to update their browser or piss off.
July 22nd, 2009
Bob says:
Hmmm. Here a lot of younglings there are.
Some of you guys sound a bit wet behind the ears, going by your aggressive tone and obviously don’t design and build large commercial websites.
July 23rd, 2009
craig says:
whoever defend the supporting of IE6 are nut, because they will prove them-self wrong in no time.
July 23rd, 2009
Steve Cousins says:
I’m guessing we’re gonna start seeing a little icon graphic at the foot of websites that reads ‘Best viewed in anything but IE6′
old skool
July 24th, 2009
BlueBoden says:
My short answer would be no, i don’t support IE6. That dosn’t mean that my site is unusable in IE6, but it sure dose look nasty.
I’ve seen about all the arguments that people use, for us to keep supporting old browsers. And none of which have been valid so far.
Most of the time it just comes down to fear of losing sales or visitors, which isn’t even a problem in the first place.
July 25th, 2009
cheekylele says:
crikey if IE6 is still around in 5 years then I may as well do all my sites in Flash to counter the issue? lulz
seems a bit silly tho to support a browser thats already 7-8 years old already … although …
if a large enough portion of the target audience is still using IE6 then we will do everything we can to ensure the site looks and functions similarly
one of our clients traffic has 20% still using IE6 – around 2,000 visitors … I cant in good conscience as a designer and developer jut ignore those 2,0000 visitors who may also be purchasing from the site – it defeats the purpose of marketing your products/services on the web
lets ask this question in 5 years time when Windoes 7 is largely in use and XP is just a distant memory …
July 28th, 2009
Lee says:
@cheekylele: Yes hopefully in 5 years we’ll have stopped talking about IE6. Who knows, we could be talking about Firefox and how it doesn’t support some CSS3 technique
July 29th, 2009
Free wordpress themes says:
Very nice article. Subscribed to your blog.
thanks
July 29th, 2009
Joe Wolfe says:
When I redesigned my portfolio site I decided not to support IE6 to take my personal stand at having the web move forward. I somewhat worry that I could lose potential clients because when they view my site they may think I don’t know how to support IE6 or that I will be stubborn to work with them if they want their website to support IE6
August 10th, 2009
Alexsandro says:
You forgot!
About: Why people are still using IE6?
Becouse Windows XP come with IE6 and Windows Vista nobody will update it. Windows Vista is poor and slow.
September 22nd, 2009
Ricki says:
Sadly there is still around 20-30% of the 70% that use Internet Explorer out there and it’s actually not that hard to make an IE6 friendly website as long as you follow the W3C standard. Of course all those fancy PNG images will not work, but these are easily changed to 8-bit PNG in the CSS.
Just finished a quite complex project where the feeling of the website is suppose to be similar to a flash site but with better support for SEO. This one works fine in IE6 and there is no difference in the coding except that I kept some of the PNG 24-bit images, to prevent unnecessary coding for IE6.
http://skiferie.visitsweden.com
September 25th, 2009
David says:
If it’s a client website and they have invested appropriately I think you should still make sure the site looks fine in IE 6. The numbers using this browser are not insignificant as to totally dismiss it.
If it’s a personal site and I’m behind on time then it’s not a priority.