Dropping IE6 Support
Debate on whether developers should stop supporting outdated Internet Explorer versions like IE6 and IE7 to force upgrades, reasons for their persistence in corporate environments due to IT policies and legacy apps, and the costs of legacy browser support.
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As soon as it is impossible to browse the web with old ie, users will be forced to switch. If you support old ie, you are contributing to it continuing to hang around.
We should all not care about IE anymore. Devs supporting it is the reason for people using it. If all the sites would be broken IE, users would be forced to upgrade.
why is IE still used so much? do these people know what they're missing?
We don't support IE6 on our web app, just IE7, Firefox2/3, Safari 3 (and Chrome works fine). We didn't give up on IE6 lightly, but we use a lot of javascript and getting it to work correctly on IE6 would have taken a lot of time, that we decided to spend on making the app better for the more modern browsers. We realise we're losing some potential customers, but have to balance that against having a better product for the browsers we do support.As we currently appeal to a mainly early-adopter
Maybe users who must use IE because of the policies of their company?
It's less than the percentage of the world still using IE6!
You are forced to use IE6 because the IT department decided that's all you need for your job. If sites stopped working in IE6 then people could make the case that they need a modern browser for their work. In the US and Europe, IE6 usage is around 5%. I think we're close enough to push IE6 completely out.
Depends on your use case... a lot of places are just plain deprecating IE altogether.
Just stop supporting IE6 and IE7 then tell users they need to upgrade. If enough sites did this then these browsers would go away. People could even recommend that IE8 be upgraded. Legacy support takes non-zero time. Apple drops legacy hardware support pretty quickly, for example. Being "lazy" has its advantages.
My Mum wont upgrade from windows 95, please keep supporting Internet Explorer 6 SP1, Stop it with any of your fancy tools/websites.The flipside is that one just accept that the users who are not able to upgrade are not your target audience and will use other systems to get their work done.Don't carry others burdens when they self impose their problems.