10 replies to this topic

[billzo]

If you read the webmaster boards, you will find that a majority of webmasters have finally dropped support for Internet Explorer 6.  As anyone who has ever coded a website knows, IE6 was notoriously buggy and didn't comply well with web standards.  Designing a site to work properly in IE6 was a major headache.  While some web designers were insisting that IE6 should still be supported as recently as last year (mainly people who design for corporate clients since some corporations ran IE6 because of legacy ActiveX applications), it appears most web coders have dropped support for IE6.  

But what about IE7?  Statcounter puts global market share for IE7 at 3.63% in January 2012 and 1.4% in June 2012.  In the USA, Statcounter says that IE7 market share was 4.4% in January 2012 and dropping to 1.94% in June.  IE7 use is dropping fast.

Is it worth continuing to support a browser that less than 1.5% of your target audience uses?  Anyone have any thoughts?  Next time I do some HTML and CSS coding I'm thinking of dropping support for IE7 and not even bother testing in it.

[djbaxter]

vBulletin formally dropped support for both IE6 and IE7 in the past year. The number of people using those browsers simply doesn't justify the time and effort they were putting in constructing workarounds.

I used to try to code for the lowest common denominator in the old days, which basically meant trying to makea site usable in early versions of IE and Netscape. Eventually, I realized what a colossal waste of time that was. That's how I'd feel today about trying to keep IE6 and IE7 users happy. Seriously... we're at IE9 and on the verge of IE10. Join us in the 21st century, why dontcha?

[davidatfuzzylime]

I ditched IE6 at the start of the year. I'm very close to ditching IE7. I already quite often produce a slightly "different" version of a site for it now - don't bother with nice tweaks like rounded corners, shadows or suchlike because it's just way too much hassle to regenerate everything for it on its own. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to ditch IE7 by the end of this year; but I still see quite a few people using it (or, worse, using IE8/9 but with "compatibility view" permanently enabled for some reason) so I don't think we're quite there yet, unfortunately.

[billzo]

I think it was late 2009 when I decided I wasn't going to bother supporting IE6 anymore.  The question now is whether or not IE7 should continue to be supported.  

CSS3 features like rounded borders and shadows and such will not display in IE7, but they will degrade gracefully and not screw anything up.  But there are other things that either will not work or are buggy in IE7 such as display: inline-block.

Google dropped support for IE7 for Gmail and other things a year ago.  Google has a little conflict of interest in pushing its own Chrome browser, though.  

Just looking at Google Analytics data for the past month for a site I have, 1.5% of total visitors were using IE7.  Looks like it is time to kiss IE7 goodbye, too.

Edited by billzo, 27 July 2012 - 10:03 AM.

[NyteOwl]

Depends on the project really. There is even some valid CSS stuff that won't display properly in IE8. I generally avoid all "hacks" built around browser limitations whenever I can and only use them if they are a necessity for a particular site. Even then I'm more likely to change the design slightly, or try and persuade a client to, than use browser hacks.

Microsoft themselves have been trying to kill off IE6 for a couple of years but it has wide corporate intranet use so it's a bit easier said than done. This year though they have officially stopped supporting IE6 so maybe the monster will finally wither and die.

[billzo]

NyteOwl, on 27 July 2012 - 11:38 AM, said:

Microsoft themselves have been trying to kill off IE6 for a couple of years but it has wide corporate intranet use so it's a bit easier said than done. This year though they have officially stopped supporting IE6 so maybe the monster will finally wither and die.

If there is a rendering bug in a version of any other type of browser (Opera, Firefox, Chrome), don't they fix it in a minor release?  Or do they leave it sit forever in that version?  (Granted, Firefox is going way overboard releasing major versions when they should be only minor version upgrades.  Firefox is up to version 14 now.)

All the rendering bugs built into IE6 when it was released in 2001 are still present today.  While many security patches have been released for that browser, they didn't bother patching any of the rendering bugs.  Only when IE7 was released in late 2006 did Microsoft bother to patch the rendering bugs.  For five years those IE6 rendering bugs were out there!

I much prefer writing PHP code to HTML/CSS.  I will never forget my participation in our first website when I designed it in Firefox then tested it in IE6 (the then current version of IE) to find it looked all screwed up.  I spent hours trying to figure out why it looked screwed up in IE6.  Frustrating, to say the least.

[emily66012]

You made a valid point but i use mozilla firefox which is much more secure then IE8/9
for some strange reasons i cant upgrade it  from IE6 to IE8

[COBOLdinosaur]

I support modern browsers.  The nature of my site is that it attracts primarily developers who tend to be up to date.  My stats show my user are 42% Firefox; 35% Chrome; 15% IE... the rest are fringe or the various mobiles (none with more than 2%) The 15% IE is 12% IE9 and 3% older crap.  So there is no reason for me to support old stuff, and I don't care about them anymore.

[ASOAyron]

For sites that I write code for that aren't required to support them, I don't support IE6/7 at all and IE8 is best-effort, in that if it works that's great but if it doesn't work and it's not a big deal to fix, I'll fix it. Otherwise, tough luck. In a business environment sometimes you just have to make it work, but especially for hobby projects I don't think it's worth the hassle to deal with old versions of IE. Gotta say though, new versions really aren't that bad to support.

[COBOLdinosaur]

I use a shim I pick up a github, that does a decent job for older IE, but I use a lot of CSS3 and HTML5 so even with the shim there are some pages that just don't work in older browsers.  For instance Older IE browsers do not know what className is in javascript, but it is the most efficient way to swap styles, so for pages using stuff the shim won't help with, I just put up a notice that the old browser needs to be replaced and I give them a link to download Firefox.

There is no way I am going to cater to relics; however I can understand that some poor suckers work for companies that have painted themselves into a corner by not stying current and they have to continue using junk to support legacy apps that rely on the defective model that M$ thought they would be able to impose back when they were dominant.  For those folks, I tell them to install IE10 and runin compatibility mode for their apps.

[ASOAyron]

COBOLdinosaur, on 17 March 2013 - 08:33 AM, said:

I use a shim I pick up a github, that does a decent job for older IE, but I use a lot of CSS3 and HTML5 so even with the shim there are some pages that just don't work in older browsers.  For instance Older IE browsers do not know what className is in javascript, but it is the most efficient way to swap styles, so for pages using stuff the shim won't help with, I just put up a notice that the old browser needs to be replaced and I give them a link to download Firefox.

I pull that shim in as part of Bootstrap when I use it, and if support is required I'll use it as well. It is very handy, good suggestion. For anyone that wants to use it, here's the HTML:

<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="http://html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

There's also a project page here on Google Code.