Time to Drop IE6 Support?
July 25th, 2008
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Recently there has been a renewed interest in the discussion in regards to dropping support for IE6. The question is: Is it Time to Drop IE6 Support?
Search the web and you’ll surely find answers as to why or why we shouldn’t stop supporting IE6 as developers.
I, for one, don’t think it’s a singular choice of either supporting IE6 or not.
This decision could - and should - be made on a site-by-site basis with the answer being determined by the demographics of your audience and the traffic logs of your site.
With traffic logs, you can evaluate the number of visitors that would be inconvenienced if you suddenly dropped support for IE6. If you have a decent share of visitors still using IE6, then the answer to support or not support should be quite obvious.
Great! That works fine for sites that are established already.
What about new sites?
The ease of answer drops dramatically when you bring an entirely new site into the equation. Supporting or not supporting IE6 on your site becomes a much more complex question.
Some data that can help is both geographic and demographic data of your sites intended audience. Depending upon your message, and who you’re directing it at, you can generally answer the question as to whether or not to support IE6.
If your demographics say that IE6 support is worthwhile the question then becomes, does it fit in your budget?
IE6 Budget Friendly?
Developing with IE6 support can, at times, take two-times the amount of work. In turn, your overall cost is going to go up. If you have a low budget, taking IE6 support out may just enable you to do some of the other functional things that you wanted.
So What Do We Do?
As for me, I’ll continue implementing IE6 support for the meantime. I honestly believe that the best answer is providing a stripped down version of the site for visitors using IE6 with a friendly message encouraging them to switch to Firefox - the preferred method - and/or upgrade IE6 to, at the least, IE7.
This would still provide visitors with a functional site but let them know that they could have a better experience on the site if they just upgraded their browser. This would fall under the “sticks and carrots” method, I suppose.
