Sharpe's Opinion
Wednesday, 15th Jul, 2009
Digg have been doing some market research to determine if they should continue to fully support Internet Explorer 6, or display a message asking users to upgrade. The graph makes for interesting reading:
This goes directly to why most folks use IE6: they don’t have a choice. Three out of four IE6 users on Digg said they can’t upgrade due to some technical or workplace reason.
Giving them a message saying, “Hey! Upgrade!” in this case is not only pointless; it’s sadistic.
This is true. My own solution to the IE6 problem is somewhat unusual. The site works perfectly fine, but gets rendered in Comic Sans. Take that, Steve Ballmer!
Comments
A lot of users don’t even know that you use a browser to go on the web, much less that you can change it. A comparison matrix of IP against known ISP ranges, and targeting home users in a non-patronising and easy-to-understand manner to upgrade is my take on the next step.
Microsoft invented Comic Sans, their users can surely take it 
Adam, it will always depend on the site, but I think most users can cope with the idea of upgrading their software. As Digg’s graph goes some way to show, though, educating users about possible upgrades is less than half of the solution. As Charlotte said, there’s lots of companies with specialised in-house software which relies on IE6 and to them the cost of upgrading all of their computers is vast.
IE6 is still something we’re stuck with for the forseeable future. But then, if you’re a web designer it’s your job to support as many browsers as possible.
Put it this way: I let my father-in-law use my netbook (running Ubuntu) and opened Firefox for him. He literally couldn’t understand how it could “look at the internet” without Internet Explorer.
To a lot of home users, it is the only thing they know, and the idea of upgrading their browser is not so much terrifying as it is an entirely alien concept – my father-in-law, again, has never downloaded an installer from the web and will wait for one to be mailed on a CD-ROM because he believes that’s the only way you can get it.
If the alternatives were presented in a hand holdy way, he, and others like him, could, and would, upgrade.
All your Intranet apps work on IE6 but not on IE7. Ha ha ha ha ha. You fear upgrade because it might break something. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Get real. Upgrade and fix it. You pay to service your car right? You pay to have it repaired? You pay someone to do a regular MOT? Why is software somehow magically different?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. You built a business critical application using a web browser, probably the flakiest environment in the world you could use to build a stable app. Sheer stupidity. If you want reliable apps stick to dumb terminals. They work just great.
But I agree, it is the web designers and devlopers job to do the best they can to make as much as possible of a site/app work on less than ideal platforms.
Unfortunaltely most designers don’t want to consider platform limitations. They want to build the latest grooviiset Ajaxed super coll uber site because the old stuff just is not cool.
The solution for designers is to stop trying to build “perfect sites” for IE6, and to resist the urge to design sites form the beginning to use the latest widgets and doodads. The guys should be flash designers, not web designers.
Start by building a functional site that works in anything. No CSS, No Javascript, No Ajax. Just pages. Just make it work using the simple stuff making it accessible for everyone.
Add sugar (Ajax, CSS etc) to the browsers that make it easy first Firefox, then IE8/7. Then make what sweetness you can work in IE6 (or any other borked browser).
Allocate a fixed amount of time/money based on the returns from that user group.
Concentrate on the easy/big payoff stuff and ignore the rest.
Now you have a site that works quite well in IE6, but also works for everybody else.
IMNVHO the mistake is to build a site that doesn’t work completely in basic HTML to begin with, and consider everything else extra sweeties.
Anyway why the hell can’t I have IE6 and IE7 installed at the same time Bill?
7% answered ‘I prefer this browser’
boggle
I suspect they are Adam’s group – those who can’t understand how other browser’s can exist in the first place…
Argh! A grocer’s apostrophe crept in!
I shouldn’t type while eating Twiglets, clearly..
Don’t forget, 28 July is International Day of Protest against Internet Explorer. Make sure your site breaks horribly on IE on that day!
My take on it is, if you test against an Open Source, standards-compliant browser, your work as a web designer is done. Anybody can run Firefox; but only Windows users can run IE.
As for those whose corporate Intranets are dependent on a particular browser version, what’s to stop them installing one browser for the Intranet and one browser — maybe even in some folder that you don’t need root access to write to — for the Internet?
Our team recently developed a document that gets linked to/displayed for users who visit our secure service in IE6. Because security is a top concern for us, we don’t support IE6.
The document is intended to be something that end users at work can send to their IT guys to describe the reasons to offer an alternative to IE6:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17681961/Why-Your-Company-Should-Offer-an-Alternative-to-IE6
-Arsen
http://mitto.com
Your Safe and Secure Online Password Manager
It’s Windows 2000. It doesn’t support anything higher than 6. Also some organisations like HBOS use XP but their intranet applications are IE6 specific so they can’t upgrade without breaking everything.
It seems very cruel to give them comic sans as well. I might just have a ‘your browser is x years, y months old.’
We’ll never be rid of it.
Charlotte Gore
July 15, 2009 at 8:54 am