At What Point Do We Just Stop Caring About IE6 Visitors?
November 23, 2010
Flickr credit: elisfanclub
"... and then you have to do this to make it look right in Internet Explorer 6..."
... and then you do this for IE6... and then you do that... and then you add this kludgey hack... and then you add that kludgey hack... and then you click your heels three times while sacrificing a goat on the eve of a full moon in order to get your 2010 web page to look good in a browser that came out in 2001!
ENOUGH ALREADY!
How much time, energy and other resources are we going to continue to waste?
At what point do we in the communication business just stop caring about IE6 users?
Yes, yes, I know that the "proper" answer is that "it depends" and you need to look at the visitors coming to your website. And yes, I can see from those stats that one of the sites I work with actually has about 7% of its visitors using IE6.
But seriously, folks... are we going to continue to design for the lowest common denominator simply because either organizational inertia or organizational incompetence is keeping people using a ~10-year-old browser???
I mean... upgrading to a newer version of IE is FREE! There aren't any of the cost issues associated with, say, Office. (And yes, I recognize that some of those companies still using IE6 are probably also still using Office 97!)
Yes, I realize that some internal apps or sites may break... but come on, how long has it been? And think of how many security issues you would address simply by moving away from IE6!
MY VOTE...
I know my vote... I'm in the process of redesigning some sites and I am NOT going to care about IE6 visitors. Now, maybe I have that luxury because the sites involved are around "emerging technology" and if you are interested in that topic it's pretty certain you are NOT using IE6 (and the stats show that)... but I'm also considering taking that option for some other sites, too.
Enough!
P.S. Hey, Facebook stopped supporting IE6 back in August... can we get other large sites to do that, too?
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