06.22.2010
We recently helped launch a new cutting edge internet media project for a major corporation, who shall remain nameless. We were tasked to involve a lot of new technologies, and we decided from the beginning on the technical side that it would be incredibly advantageous (and a major time + money saver for everyone) for us to design our sites for IE7+ (as well as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc obviously). For the most part everything ran fine in IE6, save for a few little CSS issues here and there. Almost a month after launch, our client mentioned some problems they were seeing in IE6, and we had to explain exactly why we chose to move forward without explicit support of the 10 year old browser.
This can be a difficult decision to make at the outset of a project, but the main reason to not continue supporting IE6 is simply because it is a limitation imposed on developers and designers. Until about 6 months ago, dropping support was not as viable an option, as IE6 still had a larger browser usage share than IE7 did (presumably because people were reluctant to implement Vista for years, which has IE7 as default). But as IE8 and Windows 7 rapidly gained a larger user base, IE8 quickly surpassed IE6 in usage statistics.
While IE6 still maintained notable usage metrics, this trend made dropping support a viable option for many companies including:
(there are tons of examples)
Also, when this change in trend happened, we made the conscious decision to drop support for some of our other clients at the time. This allowed us to do a lot of new, cutting edge things by pushing the limits of javascript and web design past the capabilities of IE6 — the types of things you compromise by IE6’s unpredictable methods of handling Javascript DOM manipulation, CSS interpretation, cross site communication, security, and transparent image rendering (just to list a few headaches every presentation layer developer has ever come across).
To us, it is considered forward thinking and progressive to follow these types of internet media leaders in helping to escort out the last generation of web browsers in order to make way for more powerful, dynamic, optimized sites that do not have to have creativity restrained by developing within the vastly different (and frankly sub-standard) confines of IE6. Not designing for IE6 essentially allows developers and designers to create far superior products. But it takes a real commitment and dedication on the part of the development team to stand by this, and help usher out an old era of bad design with a more forward thinking approach.
Now, all of this makes perfect sense if you are designing or developing a web application. But what if the client presents one of those corner cases where they have a lot of users in IE6?
Our client sent us a letter, essentially saying that certain R&D teams or marketing divisions were on workstations that could not be upgraded from the default IE6/Windows XP configuration because there was either not enough IT manpower to undertake the task, or there was a fear that upgrading to new browser environments would upset the stability of their internal systems.
In this case (as will be the case increasingly over the coming months), our client sent us this letter, but closed it with a different sentiment: that THIS TIME it was okay because they happened to be upgrading at the end of the month to IE8/Windows 7, but we should be more conscientious of this with future clients.
To me that is just proof that as developers, it is OUR responsibility to help push the rest of the world out of these confines and into the New World more quickly. If it weren’t for us catering to the needs of dinosaur machines, I believe that HTML5 would have already become a common entity (at least from a technical perspective — political reasons holding back HTML5 are a seperate discussion).
For more statistics on browser usage, check out the W3C’s browser stats resources.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp