A BulletProof Idea*

Bye Bye IE6

// September 13th, 2008 // browsers, microsoft, web standards

After much thought and deliberation this week (well not too much deliberation!) I have decided to drop support for IE6 to visitors who use Microsoft’s tired and broken browser to visit A BulletProof Idea!

Why?

After checking my web stats this week I have found only 0.1% (yes 0.1%) of visitor(s) use IE6 to visit this site, and that the vast majority of my audience are using Firefox, IE7, Safari and Opera. Now my design is still functional and can be read using IE6, but being a creative soul I don’t want to resort to hacks, conditional comments, javascript fixes etc.. just to cater for a miniscule 0.1% of visitors and have excessive and bloated code just to have attribute selectors and png’s with alpha transparency display badly in IE6 (or not at all!).

Now this does not mean that A BulletProof Idea! will become unusable to IE6 people – it just means that they will get a different experience to those who use modern browsers, but still get to the content. So to re-cap, future features and any improvements made to existing features may not work with IE 6.

Looking at the Operating Systems and browsers used to visit this site, I appeal to a technical audience, one that is very much part of the web standards crowd who use modern means to access my content. So, I think I am right in justifying my decision to drop IE6 on the basis of the 0.1% of visitors who use it against the whopping 99% who drop by here using a standard compliant browser.

Not just me

Facebook have also dropped support to encourage people to migrate to more modern and standards compliant browsers to enable their API’s and overall design to work the way it was originally intended. Also the guys at 37 Signals have dropped support totally and have told their clients of their intentions 2 years after dropping support of the previous versions of IE (5.0/5.5).

“IE 6 is a last-generation browser. This means that IE 6 can’t provide the same web experience that modern browsers can. Continued support of IE 6 means that we can’t optimize our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our apps. Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress. We want to make sure the experience is the best it can be for the vast majority of our customers, and continuing to support IE 6 holds us back.” 37 Signals explain why they are dropping IE6

So who is still using it?

As of August 2008, a whopping 24.5% of people worldwide are still using IE6 and the make-up of these users I would probably categorize as:

1. Companies and corporations ‘locked down’ to IE6 due to their use of old software. The results of their cost analysis proving too expensive to upgrade their whole networking infrastructure to a more modern and robust platform. (Think public sector). Microsoft did put in an option a while back for vendors to ‘opt out’ of upgrading their browsers when rolling out updates to the Windows OS so that they could keep IE6 and just have the updates not associated with the browser.
2. Many large companies have intranet web sites that were built to display on IE6 (their default browser), and upgrading Intranet applications which are incompatible with Firefox and IE7 would break their intranet sites, thus costing a large sum of money to re-design and make cross browser compatible. (something they will eventually have to do one day when Microsoft itself drops IE6 support and all the security features associated with it.)
3. Users other than companies and corporations who use older generation pc’s and bundled software which has not been upgraded due to hardware compatibility conflicting with new browser software (think of a pc with a relatively small RAM and a slow processor trying to run a modern resource hungry browser).
4. The ‘casual browser’ or ‘non technical types’ – those who occasionally browse the web or have little or no technical ‘know how’, so when Windows pops up that little message asking to upgrade their browsers, they break out into a cold sweat and click the little red ‘x’ in the corner of the pop up window hoping it will stay away for good!

So just what exactly is an iPod?

This is a question you would have asked 7 years ago when IE6 was rolled out – It’s THAT OLD! Heck we were not even paranoid about getting on aeroplane in fear of getting blown to smithereens as 9/11 had not yet happened when IE6 came out!

Yet (as of August 2008), Microsoft still have just over 50% of the browser market with IE6 at 24.5% and IE7 at 26%. The other 45% is made up of Firefox users (43%) with the remaining percentage made up of Safari, Opera, Mozilla users and not forgetting the 0.1% still with IE5!

What next

As you may have been aware (I’m sure you have, – being in the vast majority of my audience) that Google have just released their new browser Chrome. This uses webkit as the rendering engine (the same as Safari) and is in beta at the moment and documentation has been released in the form of a comic book to give you an insight of how it works and what it can do.

First impressions are fairly good from a web standards view point even though it has some early teething problems, it could seriously rival Firefox in user uptake one day. The great advantage Google has is superior brand awareness – lets be honest the Google logo is everywhere and even the casual user would be tempted to give it a try out when seeing the link on their google home page.

So with Google’s new browser and Microsoft rolling out mandatory updates from IE7 to IE8 (when it comes out) we could see that 24.5% eroding quicker than we think. Judging by the speed of migration from Firefox2 to Firefox3, the next version of the Firefox browser could also help towards burying every web developers nightmares and frustrations once and for all.

Happy days!