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How long do we worry about IE6?

If you’ve spent anytime designing for the web, sooner or later you’re going to have to come to grips with supporting older browsers - namely, Internet Explorer 6. Now, for a browser that was last released in 2001, it has had a surprisingly resilient existence. Microsoft is on IE8 right now, yet we still see significant traffic on IE6 come through our school’s website, something along the lines of 15% of total traffic. That’s a lot, though it has been trending down. For a designer/developer like myself, that figure alone is enough to spoil a Monday morning. Upgrade your browsers, people! Heck, I’d take IE7 over IE6 any day of the week.

The reason I bring this up is I had a chance to look at my little website in IE6, and of course the transparent PNGs looked awful. Just terrible. I didn’t realize that they looked that bad and made me look, well, amateurish. So I stuck on a PNG hack just for the few who came my way on that blasted browser. I could have just ignored it, and I would’ve felt justified in doing so: “You want to view the web in an outdated browser? Go right on ahead. Only don’t complain to me if things don’t look pretty as they should.” Only trouble was the PNG hack didn’t work as touted, so I was back to square one. What did I decide? Ignore it.

I can take that approach but my clients cannot. See, some of the people I design websites for depend on their website to grow their business. They can’t afford to turn off those few who stumble by on IE6, because they need the business. It’s that simple. Hence the hacks. As much as I would love to ignore it, my clients cannot.

But how long do we support it? Until traffic drops below 10%? 5%? When? Or should we simple ignore it now and move on? Google’s solution is to provide a plugin that transforms IE into Chrome.

For Christmas, I’m going to ask everyone I know to do web developers a favor and upgrade their browsers instead of getting me something.

Posted by Jesse on 09/25 at 01:25 PM

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