Dealing With IE 6 Is Like Paying Taxes
Let me start off by saying that I absolutely hate Internet Explorer 6. It’s been out for years and is a nightmare to code for and deal with. We sometimes find ourselves spending 30% of our time coding a page or function that works great until you try in on IE 6 and the remaining 70% of the time trying to get it to work correctly for IE 6. Ben Parr at Mashable even did a great post in July titled, “IE 6 Must Die for the Web to Move On.” and I agree.
With that in mind, the sad but true fact is that as of August, 2009, IE 6 still comprises almost 14% of browser usage. My educated guess without having any solid information to back it up as that about 95% of IE 6 users are in businesses. I’m basing this on the following:
- Most users in companies don’t have admin access to their PCs to make any upgrades on their own
- Most companies won’t do a company wide upgrade until it’s too painful not to deal with due to costs and/or IT staff bandwidth
- Most consumers using IE and/or a Microsoft OS get the latest version of IE through the Microsoft Updates because they always choose the default “Express” option that throws the latest IE release in with it.
For those that deal primarily with consumers on their websites, it’s getting to the point where the percentage of IE 6 users is low enough that they can say “Screw it.” and choose to stop supporting IE 6. Their own site analytics will let them know. However, for those of us that focus on helping businesses, chances are it will be one more year before we can stop supporting IE 6 without impacting potential customers.
The only upside that keeps our team going while we continue to support IE 6 (and sometimes 7) is that a good enough portion of our active customers are still using them and making sure that they have a good experience and continue to use our site as well as tell others about it means more then pushing them all away. Does it increase the company bar tab? Yes. But the trend is decreasing and we see a light at the end of the tunnel.
In this respect, I relate us coding to IE 6 like paying taxes. You hate it and you don’t understand at all how or why they made it so complicated but if the reason you’re dealing with it is because you’re bringing in business, so be it. I can live with that.
Another service that could be considered one of our competitors has a huge banner on their home page for people with IE 6 or 7 that says something similar to “You’re on IE 6 or 7 and you’re going to have a minimal experience unless you upgrade to the IE 8, Google Chrome, the latest Safari or Firefox.” What it’s telling the customer is, “Hey, you’re on IE 6 or 7 and we decided not code for that and you’re business isn’t worth it. See ya.” I love it because for a site that’s supposed to cater to business, they don’t understand that for many of their potential customers, it’s not a choice. They don’t have admin rights to their computer. For those that do, they can’t even see the site to decide if it’s worth the hassle and restarts to upgrade just for the privilege of using their site. To them I say, Thank You! Keep pushing them away. They’ll appreciate our site even more.
