Drawing the Line with Browser Compatibility
I started my day as I do any other day reading the blogs of great developers. I came across a new article by Jonathan Snook. His article inspired me to talk a little bit about my stance on browser compatibility.
IE 6, When can I quit you?
The dreaded IE 6. Many developers have started campaigns to help bring people to the “modern browser” age (http://www.ie6update.com), and I definitely applaud these efforts. I know many developers are actually writing it in their contracts that they will not support a site for IE 6. I personally can not wait for the day I can quit supporting IE 6, but I’m sorry to say we are at least 3 years away from that day. Let us take a few things into consideration that will keep IE 6 in play for these next 3 years:
- School Networks
- Large Government Networks
- Older home users
- Windows XP
In regard to the large networks, many users can not control what version of Internet Explorer they use. IT departments are very suspect of any new software and wait a long time before deciding to upgrade. Many home users see Internet Explorer as their “Gateway to the Internet”. I personally moved my parents from IE 6 to Firefox 3, and the first thing they said is “the internet is gone”. I decided the best solution was to rename the firefox icon as “internet”, and that resolved the problem. Internet Explorer in general did a great job as branding itself as “the gateway to the internet”. Even with microsoft making IE 8 a “push” through windows update I fear the % of IE 6 users will stay large until Windows XP is a thing of the past.
Drawing the line
This part of my article is more of a comment towards Jonathan Snook’s article, Supporting Old Browsers.
When it comes to market support, I’ve often looked at it as one big pie. You may say that Opera is too small to really care about. It’s only 2%. You don’t care about Firefox 2 users. It’s only 2%. You may not care about accessibility issues. It’s only 2%. Soon enough, you’ve whittled down your potential market to 90% of what it could have been.
Jonathan is correct in his assumption of the possibility of losing almost 10% of potential readers/clients, but it really comes down to cost/benefit and target audience. You have to first understand your product and your demographic (age, technical knowledge, etc). If your product is appealing to a much older age group then you should really consider spending more time with your IE 6 usability, but if you are a tech blog or appealing to a much younger audience maybe you shouldn’t spend as much time, you definitely need to spend some time on compatibility! These are decisions that you need to make before you start a project, how much time is too much time for 10%? There is no cookie cutter answer.
Helpful IE 6 links
Once again, I can not wait to get rid of IE 6, but as I said it is not going to happen as soon as everyone is hoping. Below are some helpful tools I personally use to help me with bringing down my IE 6 horrors.
- IE7.js - Helps make IE6 act like modern browsers.
- DD Beleated PNG - Fixes alpha png, but also you can use all background css features.
- IE Tester - View your site in IE 5.5 - IE 8
- IE Developer Toolbar - Nowhere near as good as Firebug, but it’s a start.
- XRAY - Javascript function that helps you view the DOM.
- Shiner Bock - I think everyone could use a few of these to help them with IE 6
If anyone has any good links to software/tools that help them deal IE 6 please post them in the comments.
Nice links. Only somewhat related since it deals with IE7, but I thought I’d mention that the IE8 beta gives you a suite of firebug-like developer tools that you can actually use to debug IE7 javascript problems, since you can put IE8 into IE7 mode. It’s sweet.
How effective have the push updates worked with FF3? If they were reasonably effective in upgrading almost all FF users to FF3 from FF2 then I would like to think something similar would happen but to a lesser degree with an IE8 push update.At the end of the day I agree with you that it comes down to the type of audience you are targeting your project to. Microsoft will have to be more aggressive than a simple push update. I’m not quite sure what other options are available to them to force companies to upgrade to IE8.
Very true what you say about cost/benefit ratio when determining whether to support it or not. One thing though, you should probably at least consider the target audience in the mix as well. If you’re coding for a target audience that is retirement age and doesn’t have a clue that IE7 and IE8 even exist or are too alarmed by “you must update” messages, then you have to figure IE6 must be supported. If your target is younger, techy, web devs, etc, then yeah, you can probably do away with much support for IE6. Be cautious of where you get your statistics though, making sure the type of site you’re building is the same type of sites that you are comparing stats. The Market Share by Net Applications site seems to be a good one for general statistics overall.
Also, now that IE8 is in full release and no longer beta, expect its numbers to rise as computer makers start shipping machines that are factory updated to IE8, even on Windows XP. And once Windows 7 comes out and gets shipped on new computers, IE6 will drop like a rock I hope. I have to honestly believe that even MS would love to see IE6 go the way of the dinosaur.
@Chris
You have to stop and compare your Firefox user to your IE user. A person physically went out and downloaded firefox, compared to a user who has Internet Explorer installed on their windows based system. IMO when comparing Firefox vs IE users it’s almost apples and oranges, ALMOST.
@Phillip
Here is the problem, the waiting game. Even with new systems being pumped out with the new IE8 and Windows 7 you will still have residual users left over. I would say the average life of a computer for a internet/email user is around 4 - 6 years.
Hello I hate IE8. Its terrible, as all others IE. FF rules
I’m an avid FF fan, but by occupation I have to use all browsers. Sheer speed….Safari and Chrome are quite fast, but the plugins for firefox are amazing!