Thoughts & Criticisms on Browsers of Past and Present: Drop IE6?
In case you haven’t been paying attention, lately there’s been a lot of talk about abandoning IE6.
Is it time to drop IE6 support?
Believe me, I’d love to respond with a resounding “yes.” The browser is 7 years old, it has all sorts of security issues, and it will most likely be the cause of me going bald by age 25. For my personal projects, I really don’t think about IE6 much because my target audience shouldn’t be using it. This blog hasn’t been debugged for it, and TweetRemote was on Mashable before I had even opened it in IE6.
I figure anybody using Twitter and setting up their own blog really shouldn’t be using IE6 for their daily browsing.
However, the market share for IE6 is still enormous–W3Schools reported 24.5% of their visitors last month were on IE6. It’s market share has been steadily decreasing, and that’s definitely encouraging to see. But it’s still huge.
How many of those users will be lost if support for IE6 is dropped?
For my personal projects, I have no problem losing a few visitors for the sake of faster development and possibly convincing a couple people to upgrade their browsers. But that’s because it benefits me, and I’m not ready to use my clients in order to make a statement and make my job a little bit easier. Chances are some of them are still using IE6–imagine explaining that one.
Perhaps in the near future I’ll change my mind, but I don’t think it’s time yet. I realize the hope is that people will see that they need to upgrade their browser in order to view a site correctly and will do so, but let’s get real–the average commercial website that your client is building isn’t important enough for that amount of user investment. Facebook (who apparently is dropping support for IE6 with their new design) perhaps is, however, and that does look promising.
Looking ahead: Meanwhile, Google launched their own attempt at a new browser, Google Chrome (incase you haven’t seen Twitter recently). Stay tuned for my thoughts on that one.
I know from personal experience, because I am a designer, that IE6 is one of the worst browsers of all time. I should say though, I am extremely biased in this opinion being that I am a HUGE supporter of open source browsers like Firefox and Flock.
IE6 is a disaster to design for now and debugging any site is such a pain that it makes me want to cry out and smash my face into this monitor. Now granted, my latest project is not up to par as I would like it to be (i.e. xhtml standards and so on…) because I took many, many shortcuts for time’s sake.
Even so, IE6 should be dropped not only by us as designers, but by the average user as well. It’s ancient technology and besides that…it’s made by Microsoft (egads!).
Well, there’s my rant…and my initial tests of Chrome have been satisfactory thus far. Here’s hoping.
While IE6 certainly makes things more difficult, eventually you realize that just about every site you do will have more or less the same issues. Once you figure it out the first (or 7th) time and know your common bugs, it gets a lot easier to deal with. PNGs can still be a challenge, though.
IE6 should definitely be dropped by average users, if not for their own browsing experience than at least for their own security concerns. But trying to lead that charge on the backs of my clients who are just trying to get a website up just doesn’t seem right to me.
As for Chrome, I’ll save my thoughts on that one for the next post.
The sooner we can drop, or drop a bamb on, that sucker the happier I’ll be.
“A bamb?”
I’m sorry, I’ve an attack of the Clouseau’s!
I can’t believe it!!!
Gasp! PNG’s, yeah they can be a real pain with IE6 and you’re right though. Once you figure out what’s causing your problem between browsers, usually you can avoid it in the future.
The key is smarter stylesheets, it’s all in the CSS. Sometimes, only sometimes do you have to use a (whispers), IE6 hack.
Here’s hoping for a day when cross-browser design becomes as easy as using only one stylesheet. *crosses fingers*