What if somebody ditched IE6?
Remeber those old-school “choose your own adventure” books? You know, you read a few pages, made a choice, then saved your place in case you died from it? (Oh, the days before auto checkpoints). Well I’ve got a similar thing for you.
Say you were developing a site geared towards a younger, more tech-savvy crowd. These people aren’t developers, designers, or even geeks. Just your rising generation of people who can’t remember what life was like without the internet.
Lets further say that many of these people are still using IE6. Now, you’re building a standards compliant, CSS-based website. This isn’t a site you’re getting paid to do, it’s just something you’re doing in your spare time for fun. You’re building this thing, continually debugging for IE6, and finally have had enough.
You have two options:
- Give up on the site.
- Forget Internet Explorer 6.
You choose to ditch IE6. You explain that the site doesn’t support IE6 and recommend either upgrading to IE7 or downloading FireFox, much like a Flash site gives a link to download Flash.
What do you think is waiting for you when you turn that page?
Man, with some template that’s just what I have to do because no matter HOW hard i try I can’t get it to look right! Then there’s the times where I only need 1 or 2 hacks to make a template look good in IE6…those are the days that keep me up for the days when everything falls apart in IE6!
I keep telling Joe, purely out of frusteration…Someday, I’m going to make a template that looks rotten in IE6 and I’m going to leave it that way!!
Two of my brothers and my Dad love IE6…Joe and I have some pretty lively discussions with them.
Yer dead. But in two years, you’ll be alive again.
I think IE6 is just a reality that you have to deal with these days. Even to a tech-oriented crowd, if someone uses IE, that’s a choice they have made. And it’s hard to say it’s a bad choice when that’s the majority opinion.
But, like all the old browsers that were difficult to support (load up NS4 sometime and explore Web 2.0 with that bad boy), you have to do it until people have made the leap. Luckily, with a tech-savvy crowd you won’t have to wait as long. With some demographics, you need to wait for them to get a new computer… and that might take four or five years.
I can’t believe I still have to design for IE5 Mac, especially when Safari comes with OSX. Not that it’s as bad as IE 5 on Windows but it’s no better than IE6.
Perhaps when CSS-P becomes more sophisticated, when they finally release CSS 3, then there will be a good reason for people to dump non-standards compliant browsers. With Flash, you are offering exciting features, animation and interactivity that are not common without the Flash engine. If a standards compliant browser meant getting to see a web page in an exciting, feature rich, new way then I’m sure even the less geeky web surfers would ditch IE for access to that.
I’ve already ditched IE5. That 1% just isn’t worth it.
If I’m developing a serious site, there’s no way I’m going to not support IE6, though. However, there are times that I’ll not give IE certain features or effects just because it’s too much hassle and doesn’t effect the content in any way.
I am wondering though what would happen if somebody did develop a really cutting-edge site and not support IE6.
Yes, I guess we did miss the target of your question. I think what would happen is that I’d get e-mail from everyone used to using IE wondering why I’d do such a thing, complaining, ranting angrily about how good web designers design for all platforms and browsers (meaning their own really). The cowards would just irritatedly avoid the site. The few brave would try switching to an alien browser to see what I had done, and the visionary one or two wouldn’t switch back.
I think if the site was interesting enough, it would shake things up. It’d be nice to get lots of e-mail (besides spam), even rants about why my site shouldn’t exclude IE. But in the end, I think most of the complacent IE users out there would just roll over and go back to that blissful, mangy, warm bed that is IE.
Or maybe I’m just a pessimist.
I so wish I could ditch IE, but over half my visitors use it. >.
Elliot, if you really want to know, you could turn off the styles for IE6 for a week and see
It would take years for everyone to adopt IE7. Just ditch your IE7 away until everyone is using Vista. I doubt the typical users will download it before Vista.
hi
i8iy4igdb3al6fe5
good luck