Web developers - do you try to make sites look optimal in IE 6 anymore?
IE 6 has always been a nightmare to code sites for, and now we’re debating whether we should even bother to make sites look optimal in IE 6 anymore or just tell our users "this site looks best in IE 7 and up." Are you still trying to make sites look optimal in IE 6?
It depends on your visitor base and your level of professional commitment to your clients.
Different sites currently report as little as 11% of visitors browsing with IE6 and as high a 29% (down from 38% a little over a year ago…it is getting better). Current average is probably in the 20% neighborhood. My shop doesn’t bother to pretend to know enough about the potential visitor profile for our clients to be willing to offend even 11% of visitors. On our own sites, we encourage all IE users to come over from the dark side, but we support IE6 and will continue to do so until it drops below the 1% mark. Our customers pay us to make them look good in all browsers (heck! we had one customer earlier this year whose default browser shop-wide WAS IE6 - as long as their checks don’t bounce, I’ll develop for them).
We take the approach of doing all initial development rounds for Firefox and then adding alternate stylesheets for IE (fixes the stuff that works the same in all IEs), an IE7 stylesheet (that fixes the common failings of everything older than IE8), and finally an IE6 version that repairs the leftover style silliness peculiar to IE6. JavaScript is a little simpler in some ways, but we do make it all work the same. Very rarely, we’ve had to tweak for Safari or Opera…never had to be different for Chrome - yet.
Doesn’t matter how I feel about it…we serve our clients by making sure they are properly visible and attractive to everyone without regard to foolish browser choices. Admittedly, we neglect about 5% of the entire browsing universe - all the very rare browsers that consistently show up individually under the 1% mark, e.g., Linux Konqueror (I say that, typing from my Kubuntu laptop but surfing on Firefox).
December 25th, 2009 at 1:25 am
This site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4 or higher!
Seriously though, IE6 is pretty garbage, but it’s still used quite a bit so it’s worth making your website at least look legible on it. Otherwise, code for IE7+
References :
December 25th, 2009 at 1:39 am
Nope, I don’t optimize for IE at all apart from making sure it all displays properly. My sites are only 100% for FF. Just make sure your site is BEARABLE on IE
Recommend your users to use FireFox or Google Chrome, anything’s better than IE.
References :
December 25th, 2009 at 2:14 am
No. People that are still on IE 6 are not my target. They are usually people that have old computers or won’t upgrade. Either way, they are people that don’t buy new things and not my target audience.
References :
December 25th, 2009 at 3:01 am
It depends on your visitor base and your level of professional commitment to your clients.
Different sites currently report as little as 11% of visitors browsing with IE6 and as high a 29% (down from 38% a little over a year ago…it is getting better). Current average is probably in the 20% neighborhood. My shop doesn’t bother to pretend to know enough about the potential visitor profile for our clients to be willing to offend even 11% of visitors. On our own sites, we encourage all IE users to come over from the dark side, but we support IE6 and will continue to do so until it drops below the 1% mark. Our customers pay us to make them look good in all browsers (heck! we had one customer earlier this year whose default browser shop-wide WAS IE6 - as long as their checks don’t bounce, I’ll develop for them).
We take the approach of doing all initial development rounds for Firefox and then adding alternate stylesheets for IE (fixes the stuff that works the same in all IEs), an IE7 stylesheet (that fixes the common failings of everything older than IE8), and finally an IE6 version that repairs the leftover style silliness peculiar to IE6. JavaScript is a little simpler in some ways, but we do make it all work the same. Very rarely, we’ve had to tweak for Safari or Opera…never had to be different for Chrome - yet.
Doesn’t matter how I feel about it…we serve our clients by making sure they are properly visible and attractive to everyone without regard to foolish browser choices. Admittedly, we neglect about 5% of the entire browsing universe - all the very rare browsers that consistently show up individually under the 1% mark, e.g., Linux Konqueror (I say that, typing from my Kubuntu laptop but surfing on Firefox).
References :