Time To Drop Designing for IE6?

June 10, 2008

I’ve been a proponent of steadily phasing out IE6 support but too many of my clients (and their at-home usability testers, hah) have IE6 inadvertently installed on their machines. You don’t know how many times I walk a client or friend through Help > About Internet Explorer and ask them to read me the version number and I was shocked to hear that they were still using IE6. “You should download Firefox or the latest IE 7.0 if you must,” I’d repeat again. A few years ago, IE6 users had more reason to gripe– it was installed on most machines at their workplace (businesses who’s windfall profits in the 90’s left their employees on Win98 machines with the latest in browsing technoloy; IE6!)

But it’s no longer the nineties, and after Facebook started recommending IE7 to IE6 users, Apple recently dropped it entirely for MobileMe service and others my ears have started perking up. I mean, Microsoft realease IE7 as a “high priority update” for Windows XP users, so that an automatic update was likely done on millions of machines.

Can I stop testing my applications and web designs in IE6? The answer is, yes I can!

The bottom line is that you should try to keep all core functionalities of your web application or website accessible to every user, but we are in the days of AJAX (dynamically loading information into a rendered page) and our view of plain websites has shifted into rich internet applications. Antiquated browsers like IE6 struggle to keep up. So, ditch em. But be graceful about it.

What to do?

• I recommend using Dean Edward’s latest IE7 javascript libraries that handle most of IE6’s CSS style issues and other bug fixes. You can drop the javascript code into your site and it will make a ton of your normal CSS fixes for IE6 non-existant.
• If you are using a great deal of AJAX and find that some of your features are buggy with IE6 and lack the resources or enthusiasm to debug and correct IE6 issues, I’d consider using the javascript from SaveTheDevelopers.org to let your IE6 users know they are using an outdated browser and an upgrade will let them get all the content and functionality.

At some point, as designers and developers, we need to take actions that greatly reduce our development time and Advil intake. This is one such measure… but do the research first. Ideally you should have an idea of just how many users you’d be affecting when you decide to degrade support for IE6. And, as always in CSS, writing basic definitions for all browsers/platforms and then writing enhanced CSS for standards-compliant browsers utilizing the new CSS3 revision will only help your cause.

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