A vital stage of web development is ensuring a website works effectively with the growing array of browsers and platforms.
Add mobile into this mix and you get a rapidly evolving range of combinations.
I don’t mind this, in fact I quite enjoy the opportunity to learn about the new technologies and push the boundaries a bit. However what I don’t like doing is spending hours ‘dumbing down’ a website so that it works in Internet Explorer 6 (IE 6).
IE 6 is not far off ten years old now and even when it was launched it wasn’t particularly good. Full of security flaws and a law unto itself when it comes to rendering websites, it didn’t exactly offer a great user experience.
Fortunately usage is dropping but it still lingers on in some areas, China in particular. My inclination is to completely drop support for it, perhaps not even test new websites in it, but occasionally I see statistics for a live website that show that up to 20% of users still browse with IE6. Now that is a sizable number of users, easily enough to warrant fully supporting IE6 in my mind.
I suspect part of the problem is simply ignorance. Not everyone will realise they have a choice in how they access the internet (or even that the browser makes any difference)… In fact I remember when I first started using the internet back in the late 90s I didn’t realise it extended any further than the AOL “walled garden” for quite a while. The ‘Spread Firefox’ campaign has done well to get many users to switch over but it is still mainly tech-savvy people. In the UK Google are currently running a billboard campaign promoting Chrome, with an emphasis on it’s speed, which should help inform the masses.
Anyway back to my original point. Until usage drops significantly I’ll still have to spend a fair amount of time making sure each new website we develop doesn’t fall to pieces when viewed in IE6, or as I have done here, stop supporting IE6 and provide instructions to the user on how to upgrade.
So if you are reading this and you are using IE6 (go to Help > About Internet Explorer to find out) then please, please, please upgrade to something better, trust me you’ll be amazed at how much greater the internet looks and works. Here are some options to get you started:
Just click the link, follow their download instructions and enjoy a whole new world of fun!
P.S. I personally use Firefox and Chrome.
