This month’s edition of .net magazine arrived through the door yesterday which I always anticipate. It’s a must read if you’re involved with the web. Sometimes the larger articles aren’t down my street but generally I’m happy with it.
There’s an article covers the banana skin that is IE6 for web designers & developers. It definitely got me thinking, especially as my site has been relaunched.
The biggest development hurdle I faced during the development of my site was making sure that it displayed consistently across the browsers, most notably IE6. It’s well documented as to how IE6 behaves differently from other browsers. I should have documented my development time during the build (all very well in hindsight). I estimate that plugging the bugs in IE6 must have added quite a few days onto my time, it’s also very frustrating when you know it works in good browsers.
I decided to support IE6 because Google Analytics reported that for the whole of the last calendar year, IE visitors accounted for 73%, with IE6 taking 44%.
Having read the .net article I’m now beginning to think that I made a mistake by supporting it. People generally come to me because they recognise I know what I’m talking about when it comes to the web. Rather than encouraging people to use an old piece of software, I should be encouraging users to upgrade, especially when there’s no cost involved and a newer browser would greatly enhance their online experience.
IE6 is now 8 years old, which is ancient by web standards. IE7 has been available since October 2006 and IE8 is in Beta. You then have Firefox (my personal favourite), Safari and more recently, Google Chrome.
“But you’re an independent developer!” I hear you cry - yes I am but consider larger businesses than me (and possibly you for that matter) have dropped IE6 support, businesses like Apple, Google & Facebook to name a few.
It wouldn’t take me long to drop support for IE6 so if you come back one day and you’re getting an upgrade message, you’ll know why. In fact, I’ll go one better, I’ll introduce a poll of users to see if I should drop IE6 support.
Posted by Steven Grant on 02/24 at 02:58 PM
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