Why It’s Time To Stop Optimizing Websites for Internet Explorer 6
Many web developers (more than I could believe) are still spending a lot of time to optimize their works for Internet Explorer 6. This practice was necessary some years ago when IE6 maintained an important market share near to the 20%— 30% but now it’s just a time consuming and non-value added activity.
Recent statistics, updated to November 2010, report that the most popular browsers are Internet Explorer with a market share of 28.6% (in particular IE8 with 17.6% and IE7 with 6,5%) and Firefox with 44%. Internet Explorer 6 maintains only a residual share near to 4%. That means, in average, every 100 people that visit a website potentially only 4 of them could not display in the right way its pages.
During this year Internet Explorer 6 lost more than 6% of his market share changing over from 10.2% in January to 4.1% in November. This negative trend is a clear clue that residual part of people still using Internet Explorer 6 is quickly abandoning it. Not by chance Google (for some of its services), YouTube and Facebook phased out support for IE6 respectively in March and August 2010.
Internet Explorer 6 was a terrible browser. Its popularity and its not respect of standards was for long time the nightmare of every web developers: now that it’s almost dead, it’s an useless fury to prolong their suffering.
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Internet Explorer PERIOD is a terrible browser. Support for all forms and versions of it should be removed. Allow people to open their eyes and realize they have a choice and the options are much better than what is forced upon them.
I disagree IE9 Beta anyway is pretty darn good, still has it’s mistakes but what browser doesn’t. I mean i can see exactly where your coming from.
Totally agree with Gary.
I’m sure IE9 is going to be a good browser. BUT. How many years has it taken for Microsoft a company worth billions to create a browser that is not that complex compared to others. Microsoft is satan. I rest my case.
microsoft isn’t satan, microsoft isn’t a software company too.
Internet Explorer is a horrible browser period. Why?! Because it gets outdated. Chrome, Firefox, and Safari pretty much force you to upgrade, which keeps your browser up to date with web standards. Such as we now have webkit, and mozkit. But to upgrade IE, it takes a Service Pack, and a lot of effort in most cases. Which is why there are still many companies sticking to IE6.
IE9 is not the solution to our problems, it’s the beginning of our problems.
Nice article, yeah your right it’s a waste in time and resource’s trying to code for IE6.
Thanks Gary :)
It seems alot of developers are agreeing on this point, especially recently (or at least any developers who are worth their salt). I think the release of IE9 may have also kicked everyone along a little and away from this dinosaur of a browser. The fact that IE9′s website would not render properly in it’s lowly cousin was also a pretty big clue – if the creators of IE6, with their bottomless pockets, do not spend the time and money to support that browser, why would anyone else?
Invariably, when dealing with projects where a client has demanded that IE6 be compatible, I have responded by doubling the quote. Always get a massive “Please explain?” response from the client, at which time I inform them that due to the nature of the browser and the coddling it requires to be convinced to behave, it tends to take just as long to get IE6 playing nice as it does to get the whole website developed and running in Gecko/Webkit/modern IE browsers.
I wonder how long before the death of ALL IE browsers starts to become a possibility? If FF already commands 44% of the market, and with Chrome and Safari rapidly encroaching on the market, especially with the mobile niche and Safari (in the iPhone). I’d be happy to see the day the “halo’d e” is lost from the net.
I totally agree with you.. It is very time consuming to optimize websites for IE6.
There is also the fact that many spammers and bots still use the mask IE6 (or the actual browser)which will of course affect statistics on usage. You might find that the 4 people you think cant see the site properly may be as low as 2
True!
So Is that mean IE Losing the grip from market Despite the new featured support of IE9?
As always, stats vary depending on the site. I have a programming blog where only 14% of the visitors use IE. And then I manage several e-commerce websites where the IE usage is around the 55% mark, and IE6 is still around 10% of the total. Still, it’s nice to see it’s almost gone.
IE 6 is a horrible browser **now**. It was a great browser when it was released, with more CSS support than any browser at that time or before.
I’m not sure that IE 6 “was” a terrible browser, considering it was released in 2001, but it goes without saying that it is terrible today, as arguably any browser released in 2001 is today. Then again, the case can be made that IE is terrible regardless of its version and release date, and no designer/developer should accommodate for it, but alas the status quo wins … for now.
Browser statistics from place like w3, statcounter etc.. are misleading at best and should not be used as a basis of which browser to support. Here are the stats for the last month from a site i own:
Browsers : Visits : Percentage
1. Internet Explorer 130,022 72.79%
2. Firefox 27,878 15.61%
3. Safari 11,574 6.48%
4. Chrome 8,300 4.65%
5. Opera 446 0.25%
What’s more important than supporting various browsers is supporting your users. Look at your own statistics and than decide. 6% of my users are using IE 6 so i will continue to support it. Personally i use Firefox but i think the fall of IE (any version) has been greatly exaggerated.
Indeed
If accommodating for IE 6 does not cause you to scale your design down then it works out, but if you are scaling down for IE 6 users then you put the overwhelming majority of your visitors at a disadvantage (relative to standards and competition).
Disagree on the using of the stats. That’s the browsers the customers are using, not the browsers they should be using. Let just make them upgrade. Probably 110000 are using IE cause they don’t know what a browser is or how you install a new one. If the page they are visiting is all ‘screwed’ up they will actively ask why. We don’t ‘support’ 8″ floppy disks or even 5.25 inch floppys.
‘We’, all need to move on.
I personally would encourage accessibility when optimizing websites. As such, if websites can work in Netscape 4 and Opera 3000 then I know we’re doing something right. To shun any browser out is to not take accessibility seriously, but to simply care about making the developers life easier … which is not the same thing as making websites accessible. Optimizing websites it important, but please don’t optimize them for specific browsers.
Interesting point of view Steven. I agree with you.
Very good point Steven. I agree 100%.
You mentioned exactly what i think… I agree with you..
I think most IE6 users now are working from corporate machines. My employer’s biggest customer is a major local government authority and all of their machines run IE6, which means the web apps we develop for them have to be optimised for IE6. I don’t know a single developer who likes IE6, but that doesn’t mean it is possible to just ignore them. If you can afford to turn away work from customers who require IE6 – congratulations, you’re obviously successful enough to be able to pick and choose your work. For the rest of us, we just have to keep on churning out code until IE6 finally goes into retirement.
Also, to say IE6 was never a good browser is plain wrong. Back in the day it was awesome and it has aged surprisingly well. 9 years is a phenomenally long time in web years and it is still just about kicking. If there was a browser hall of fame, IE6 should be the first inductee.
I agree James. We are in exactly the same situation – most of our clients are local government authorities and they are all using IE6 (one has recently “upgraded” to IE7… yeah, go figure!). Anyway, dislike it as we may, our clients are constrained to use IE6.
I personally don’t optimize for IE6 anymore, mainly because i only do danish websites and according to fdim.dk 1,804% of the danish users still use IE6.
But like some people say it IS a terrible browser, but back in the day… woah it was great!
RIP IE6 (you will be missed, not for the way you did work, but for who you were)
Geography changes these figures alot, I worked on a South African Site recently and their IE6 figures were still in the 20% range.
I wish I could let it die, but I still have an ie6.css in our project. 3% is still a substantial amount of revenue when you’re dealing with a corporate site.
I’m sorry but am I misreading these statistics? IE has a lower percentage than FF? Who released these statistics, mozilla.com?
Until my clients stop using IE6, I’ve got to keep supporting it.
You can find these stats here: http://bit.ly/2zHpv
Thanks, that makes a lot more sense. Those stats are specific to the W3C website. Obviously IE is going to have a much lower market share because the majority of developers only use IE for testing purposes.
“W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.”
So these stats aren’t reflective of the web as whole then.
I wonder if anyone has statistics on the use of IE6 outside the US, especially in developing countries? I recently helped a non-profit with their website, and their target audience was in the Philippines. I had a hard time finding stats, so we optimized for IE6 just in case.
Has anyone else here run into this in the past?
Hello Folks,
If you have not tried the IE9 Beta yet I encourage you to go to http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ and download the Platform Preview 7 and test your designs in the new IE9 Beta PP7. In addition you can try the new IE9 Beta which allows you to view pages in IE9 or IE8 compatibility mode, for the developer these are helpful tools to see how your designs look in the newest browsers.
Cheers,
Rick
IE Outreach Team
This comment does not address the topic of the blog post. I’m sure you are enjoying patting yourself on the back for finally producing a beta browser that is even close to competing. However, developers still have to make decisions as to how many hoops to jump through, and how much they should dumb down designs in order to deal with IE’s manifest inadequacies.
Thanks, Rick! Looking forward to your thoughtful response. Or perhaps you could just remind us how great IE9 is going to be.
I agree that the statistics are a little hard to believe, but I also agree with Antonio. It’s time for IE6 to go; I just wish we could make the general public realize that.
I wonder what the numbers are if you measure browser usage in companies. I know for a fact that many large dutch companies still maintain IE6 as standard. So for now, i’ll have to keep taking it into account…
What do you mean time to stop?! I stopped a long time ago. As long as designers continue to make special efforts and exceptions to support it, it will continue to live. If websites would just stop supporting it, users would have no choice but to choose a more up-to-date browser platform and version.
That’s the point! If designers continue to support it, it will be continue to live.
I stopped a long time ago. IE6 is only relevant to corporate users.
Most IE6 user are stuck by their company machines. I’m sure back at home they would use modern browsers or at least an IE8.
New laptop and computers that come with pre-installed Windows nowadays already equipped with IE7 and 8. So the case with IE6 is on the corporate companies.
I’m not optimizing for IE overall. My Google analytics reports that only 5% of my users are from IE and it is fast declining.
I am really happy that market share is decreasing but still it has higher share in under developing countries.
I wish microsoft also give update patches for HTML5 and CSS3 for their browsers.
I announced to all my clients a while back that I was no longer building for IE6 and the problem was that some of them insisted that some of the designs I had done for them were wrong or not working.
It wasn’t until I discovered that they were still using IE6 that I was able to solve their problem. (with a link to the newer version of the software)
Sometimes it is easier to point out how few people use it, and that the company that developed it is not going to support any longer, that gets them updating their browser.
I never looked at IE6 anymore for past months, however I consider it when clients ask Internet Explorer optimization
Interesting, but I think there is here a lack of geographical context. If you look at some statts from statcounter (http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201001-201012) you will see that wordlwide, IE6 is still near to 6%. Now play with the “country/region” and you will see that IE6 is near 14% for Asia, for Africa, more thant 14%.
I agree that IE6 is sometimes tricky, but I’m so used to deal with it that it became part of my routine to support it. But I think that you really need to take the internnational context into account. If you are for example working with a big travel agency website dealing with clients in Asia and so, pushing away 14% of the market may be a little bit dangerous don’t you think ? Saying you should not support IE anymore should be shaded with the words “now your target audience” and see what’s best for them.
Now if one of my clients wants to make it’s site IE6 compatible, I add an item to the invoice after the explanation of the problem. In 80% of cases, the customer decides not to take this service and 8% did not choose to work with me.
But in a way, these 8% would cost me more money than it brings because they are customers who do not understand, and believes it pays to have all the rights over you.
My english it’s not perfect, sorry.
I have a separate development machine with IE6 installed on it. When I complete a site design I try to browse it in IE6. If it works, great. If it doesn’t I progressively remove JS and CSS until it’s usable, and stick a banner at the top suggesting the user upgrades their browser. I understand some people are stuck with IE6, but they have to accept the site’s not going to be pretty.
marketshare is far from a justification, however you should target for your audience,
Even if “optimizing” for a browser is a pain in the *whatever*, remember that your website should be viewable with lynx :) .
As the w3schools stats disclaimer is mentioning, is that you should not rely on these stats at all,
And in my point of view, in the context make a very poor argument ( in that case according to your stats, I should not care about safari at all).
I think its more a case of ‘who is the end user’. If you’re creating a website that is intended for a developer based audience then of course there’ll all going to be using either Firefox or a webkit based browser like Safari or Chrome. If, however, you are creating a website that is going to be aimed at the kind of people who only have access to a system where IE6 is the only option (quite a few steel companies I’ve done work for can only use IE6 on their systems, and so do its customers) then there definitely is a requirement to optimise! Like Sean Thomas stated above, 72% of his visitors use IE, I bet a good chunk of them use IE6.
I’m not saying we should continue to optimise for IE6, I’m in agreement that it is a royal pain in the arse, I’m just saying that there will be a need to do so on some occasions!
I think that the decision to support IE6 or not doesn’t depend on the global usage statistics but on the statistics of your own ‘userbase’. In example, many company’s do run IE6 as their main browser, this makes it unacceptable to stop supporting this old browser when you are developing a website or web-application for such a company.
Besides, there are many graduations in not supporting a certain browser and fully supporting it. In general I do not spend much time on the full support of browser like IE6 in terms of aiming at function-/pixel-perfection when building a website or -application but I think it is important that the essential functions of a website can be used in a browser like IE6 (or other browsers that have like more than 2% market share).
Completely agree with Lankhorst, it depends on your userbase. I have clients in large corporations that are still running IE6 so you have to build for them. Stats for a web tech website will be vastly different to, for example, a patient support site aimed at 60+ year olds.
Basic functions such as navigation should work in IE6
I totally agree with you.. too bored about that browser… what a shame for IE6 users :D
You are late with that :-D
Unfortunately, in the web stats of many of our customers IE is leading, and IE6 has still a quite high percentage. That means we’ll not be able to drop IE6 support for a while, tho it’s annoying as hell.
Head of IT dept at my workplace (thats about 70 developers mostly php some .NOT and other), put that in pracitice. IE6 is banned. There are workstations with IE6 but anyone that has issues with IE6 and new features of our apps just needs to move on.
I agree to some extent, but not if your corporate client is using IE6 themselves.
out of interest, the site i develop and maintain has a browser usage stats of :
1. Internet Explorer 81.79%
2. Firefox 9.21%
3. Chrome 5.17%
4. Safari 3.26%
and of that IE, :
1. 6.0 41.92%
2. 7.0 30.15%
3. 8.0 27.58%
because of the nature of the industry getting the visitors who connect to update their browsers is a task in itself, and covered in red-tape.
So I unfortunately still have to hack for IE 6/7
Until the Windows XP is abandoned; we still have to support ie6, now matter how much we hate it.
The problem is,
1- Most of the corporate executives are not tech savvy they use the same browser which cam with OS and they are contend with it.
Why you would have to support? Because are the people from whom you would get money. Ignoring they would be very costly even if they are 1%.
2-Cost
When you talk about big networks, then have old computers so it will have
-hardware costs
-Risk of current systems being incompatible
-Training Cost (don’t laugh, you need to tell they how to use tabs)
If you have 200 PCs in your network then it would be wise idea to give more money to developer to support ie6 than the above mentioned costs.
Ejaz — “Most of the corporate executives are not tech savvy”
Most corporate environments are locked down. Even if those corp. execs. are very savvy, they aren’t permitted to install software or upgrade their browsers. On top of that, even if they were permitted to make changes on their box, they might not be permitted to upgrade their browser, as much back end corporate infrastructure was and is so very tightly integrated into IE6, that they need to upgrade that entire back end environment just to be able to upgrade their browsers. The two are inextricably linked.
it’d be nice to have the choice – in a general e-commerce situation you can take a punt on the statistics, accepting that while you will be alienating the IE6 users, the benefits and advantages this gives you in terms of your design may cause more if the modern browser users to convert, so it kind of balances itself out.
Where we are completely stuck though is in B2B sites / industry. For example, companies who bought a web-based back office solution or intranet twelve years ago and won’t pay to have it modernised. They therefore kit out their entire staff with IE6 machines – in the job I do, simply saying that these people are “stuffed” isn’t an option unfortunately :(
The whole not upgrading thing is a false economy though – one day, they’re going to HAVE to upgrade. I used to work in an office where there was a really old mainframe system that the company still heavily relied on. It basically was a thirty year old computer sitting in the corner whirring away to itself. I wonder, in another 20 years time, if companies will still have “the IE6 machine” sitting in the corner serving the same purpose :)
please don’t forget ie7, must be dead too!
You cannot simply say “now it’s time to stop supporting IE6″ – some websites have almost 0% users with IE6, on another websites it could be 40%. For me, people with IE6 are as important as those with Chrome 9; everybody can bring me some profit or more visitors, no matter what browser or operating system that person uses.
IE6 users are usually people who don’t know, don’t want or don’t have permissions to upgrade to newer version of their browser – saying “I don’t support your browser, please return using another one” just means they’ll leave and go to another website => I’m losing visitors, money…
I don’t think any designer will disagree with your title. I however, cannot stop supporting IE6 for one simple reason: 10% of our site’s visitors still use IE6. If I ignore those people, I alienate hundreds of visitors. Also, ignoring them won’t make them switch browsers–many of these people use IE6 at their jobs and cannot switch due to application requirements or business policy.
So, yes, I agree with you and wish IE6 died a long time ago, but no, I simply cannot ignore those users. Hopefully they get with the program quickly, because I reheheally hate IE6.
Almost 1 year now, NOT SUPPORTING IE6 anymore!
If sniffed, a message appairs telling the user that IE6 is too obsolete.
Its time to say ENUFF.
I am delighted to have found this blog; as a non techy I find the comments here perfectly understandable… bit worrying really.
I have to agree with the majority of the comments on here, however, I always had a policy of only supporting the previous two browser versions when I was freelancing. This was after a lot of trying to code for every browser, eventually this becomes ridiculous and actually starts to impact your business in a way that would rapidly render it un-viable.
As such, I decided the best way to go was to support the last two versions of any browser and if a previous version was detected, display a message to the user to that effect and advising them to upgrade.
It’s interesting that the UK government recently released a statement saying that they won’t be upgrading their systems from IE6 as this would be a substantial cost to the taxpayer. Instead they stated that their reliance on hardware solutions (such as external firewalls) was suitable for their needs.
It worries me that a government can’t see the danger in this approach, they hold a lot of my information, and I would like this to stay private, surely part of this should include keeping their systems up to date? I do wonder how they are ever going to update if they won’t ever shell out the money, who knows, maybe they won’t? Eventually this IS going to end up with them getting a serious amount of data hacked, but maybe that’s the type of catalyst that it will take for them to take the situation seriously.
And the official government response is here if anyone wants to take a look;
http://www.hmg.gov.uk/epetition-responses/petition-view.aspx?epref=ie6upgrade
Well, this is great news. I hate IE 6, and I think if we all stop supporting it together we can get rid of it. I also think we should put some effort in to display a ‘no-support’ message to all IE 6 users.
Although I have been working on a ‘lite’ version of a lot of my bigger sites that IE 6 happens to run in perfectly due to it’s lack of design features, they are mainly for people with slow internet connections or smaller screens. But honest, we are much better telling them straight to STOP USING THEIR BROWSER.
But what are the chances that the 4% of it’s users are all Developers working on versions of their designs for IE 6?
Yes i’d love to wave it goodbye but, alas, corporates are often the last to change. So whilst major clients still have IE6 then we will have to continue to support it.
They who pays the bills must be obeyed. Sadly.
What are you insane?!?!
To stop supporting a version of IE is like cutting off your family jewels! Corporate leaders are years behind the tech! Employees have no say over which browser they use or for that matter which OS! Business is continuing to use XP and IE6 because Vista is garbage, Vista for Business even more so! I use Vista Business (sometimes) because it came on my PC and upgrading is costly and hazardous to the health of my data!
Windows 7 is total eye candy for noobs that can’t seam to find the menu to change colors of the text, simplified junk for idiots!
Why is it that to make things easy they have to remove what made it usable?
I have spent the better part of thirty years learning and relearning and relearning and relearning where everything is each time MS does an upgrade!
I now run XP in VirtualBox from my Ubuntu LINUX server and IE6 just works well with it!
Some people don’t think before they come up with stupid crap that makes no sense to those of us that have to use the crap!
I bet the next Windows version will be a rip-off of Android with no apps for configuration at all, just app buttons and no control panel because “The control panel confuses the morons!”
The dumbing down effect in America is hazardous to my bottom line!
Rev. Alfred Haines
Love your comments! Especially about the control panel.
Statistics this, numbers that, developers say …. sometimes none of that matters. REALITY is different that what could/should be ….
Not long ago, I worked for a medical company that delivered medical reports to doctors – it didn’t matter what we thought, what was a best practice, but SEVERAL of our biggest paying clients still used IE 6, so we had to support it. From their perspective, the website not working in IE6 meant the website was not working. Plain and simple.
For whatever reason, their IT departments (PLURAL) refused to upgrade them, we can’t explain why, we shook our heads, but what were we supposed to do? So we supported it. Sometimes it happens, it’s not the first time I’ve run into that situation recently. It is worth losing all those clients? No, it wasn’t that big of a deal to support IE6, either.
We still optimize for EI, but I’m greatly considering stopping this after reading this blog and all these responses.
I develop for the U.S. Army and this is a constant battle, since many installations, sites, deployed groups don’t get to update with the rest of the world. In fact, I’m at work using IE7. But I often hear complaints that someone can’t access a resource or site… why they are running IE6 or something worse. I hate optimizing for IE period. Hopefully IE9 will start to catch up with other browsers and you wont have to have your CSS to pieces to fix it.
The main reason to move away from IE6 are the gaping security holes.
IE browsers are suck… y they didn’t follow browser standard? because they’ve got high market shares… i hate to optimize IE…. IE sucks….
IE 6 is dead we all agree on that
I don’t even support IE6 anymore. I simply apply a javascript message for IE6 that informs the user that the browser they are using is 10+ years old and they really should upgrade.
As for IE7, IE8, and IE9.. I’m fine with them. If you code your CSS and HTML correctly, there really shouldn’t be any need for a hack. I’ve only run into some issues when using Cufon and IE7.
I agree that developers shouldn’t be devoting time and resources continuing to ensure IE6 compatibility! Continuing to do so is really holding back the future of the web! Recently, Google, YouTube, Hotmail, and WordPress to name bit a few have all dropped support for IE6, and last year we took the difficult – but right – decision to no longer support IE6 in our web based room scheduling app http://mid.as
Developers are reluctant to take the same stand as we did, as many corporations are still insisting on IE6 compatibility, because they haven’t migrated their IT infrastructure past IE6 simply because they will have one or two apps that won’t run on IE7/8/9! Corporations should be putting more pressure on developers to ensure full compatibility with CURRENT browser versions, not decade old legacy browsers! Similarly developers should be educating clients/corporations on the need to migrate past IE6.. and Microsoft themselves have a lot to answer for – continuing to support IE6 until 2014!? Microsoft need to be standing up to corporations still on IE6, but they don’t like to “rock the boat”
I recently posted an entry on this whole ongoing IE6 saga:
http://blog.mid.as/index.php/2011/07/20/the-great-ie6-debate-are-microsoft-holding-back-the-web/