To Support IE6 Or Not….That Is The Question

By: Jason Craig on Sep 14, 2009 | No Comments

Internet Explorer 6 aka IE6 was released to the public on August 27, 2001, making it over eight years old now. The question that needs to be answered is should be still be supported in current web development.

You can guarantee yourself you will get varying answers from nearly everyone you talk to. Let’s go over some pros and cons of supporting it starting with the cons first.

The technology that IE6 supported has long since passed and been replaced with newer and better technology. ‘Tis the way of the world no? It is truly a pain to code/design around. If a client wishes IE6 support there is a good amount of time setting up a site so IE6 renders it right, whereas more recent browsers, including newer versions of Internet Explorer render sites properly.

The pros in having the additional support should be obvious. You won’t have to worry about an issue arising where one or more of your visitors cannot access certain parts of your site or have it appear ‘off’ to them when browsing in IE6.

The next question is, how many people are still using a defunct browser such as IE6? Browser statistics show the use of IE6 is steadily on the decline with only 14.4% of web users still using IE6, compared to 15.9% using IE7, 9.1% using IE and a whopping 47.9% using FireFox. On a side note, for those of you that are still using any of the IE browsers at all and have not tried FireFox out yet, you’re truly missing out. FireFox is fast, lightweight, and extremely customizable.

Let’s talk about that 14.4% for a moment. Who are they and why would they choose to use a outdated browser? Merely speculating, they could be users from a corporation or large entity which simply has not upgraded to a newer version of Internet Explorer or a more mature user who simply has no desire or need to upgrade.

What should be considered is knowing your target audience. If for example, you have a knitting site, odds are you are catering to more of a mature user group and they could fall in to that 14.4% still using IE6 and might be beneficial to still support the browser. On the other hand, if you have a site about the latest and greatest motherboards, odds are your target audience is a younger, tech savvy user with the latest browser and updated systems.

The bottom line is this. Do you pay your coder/designer a bit more to ensure your site renders properly in IE6 due to your target audiences requirements or do you simply forgo it and not worry about the loss of a few users and hopes in some small way, you’re leading them down the path to upgrade?

In the end….the choice is yours.

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