Internet Explorer causes web developers a lot of problems. Specifically supporting older, less CSS/standards friendly versions like 6.0. Internet Explorer 6 still requires a lot of hacks and fixes to get working properly and in some cases can limit your design. Complaints about Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in the web development community are a dime a dozen, everyone wants to complain about IE6 but nobody seems willing to do anything about it. If IE6 needs to go away, let’s do our part to help, stop supporting it.
Is IE6 Support Really Needed?
A lot of people will showcase their attention to detail and thorough craftsmanship by detailing the different types of configurations they use to test their markup. Every version of Internet Explorer, Windows XP, Vista, Firefox 2 and 3, Safari on OS X, Safari on Windows, the list goes on.
I’m not sure if this time is always well spent. Sure, it’s nice to be able to say that you got your code working in all of the “major” browsers but what’s the trade off? Hours of time spent tweaking and tweaking your CSS looking for the fix to that magical bug causing some slight visual discrepancies in IE6 on Windows XP? Doesn’t sound like a good use of my time.
Analyze Your Access Logs
Here are some statistics I have compiled from three sites that I either built or maintain. One site is a lower traffic informational site, another is a medium traffic wealth building program membership and e-commerce website and the last is a high traffic travel website that receives a lot of traffic from paid search on Google and Yahoo.
I have combined the log files since June 1st, 2008 and used some basic unix commands to count the number of times certain user-agent strings were found.
Here are the results as a percentage of each user-agent:
- MSIE 7.0 – 50%
- MSIE 6.0 – 30%
- Firefox (2,3) – 12%
- Safari – 4%
- Others – 4%
Not surprisingly, Internet explorer has a huge lead over the Firefox, Safari the “others” combined. What is worth noticing is that IE6 users only make up 30% of the total traffic.
Does the Page Render Well Enough?
Are you are spending time trying to line up two divs that are a couple of pixels off, reducing the font-size of a certain element by a few points or trying to get that margin to be exactly ten pixels instead of twelve pixels?
Stop, now, you are probably wasting your time.
A LOT of people who use Internet Explorer use that browser because it came with their computer and they don’t know or care about alternatives. They are not concerned with web standards and CSS compliance. If a website looks and feels like most other websites they are not going to notice some extra padding or misalignments of three pixels here and there.
These visitors, like most, want to find the information they were looking for or accomplish the task they set out to complete. They are not interested in the minor design bugs that might be present on your site.
Chances are your website would be better, for everyone, if you spent that “IE6 bug fixing” time improving the general usability and information architecture of your site. Wouldn’t that be a better use of your time?
But My Client Insists
A site you have designed for a client has a couple of visual flaws in IE6. Your client mentions them to you and insists that they be corrected. They are using IE6 to preview the site as you work and everything on must be perfect before they are willing to launch.
Ask them which item they are willing to forgo on their priority list to account for the time you will spend fixing that IE6 bug. Instead of giving in suggest that you complete all of the other major functionality, launch the website and then if it is still a problem you can fix it later.
If they have server logs from a current website or a sister website, analyze those and see what type of user-agent break down you’re dealing with.
Remind them that there are certain aspects of the website that will help them accomplish their greater goals and that these are more important than minor visual flaws.
Fixing IE6 Bugs Does Not Make you Special
Congratulations, you solved some problem related to IE6 rendering that someone else already solved. You do not get a prize, you do not get respect you do not get to boast. Please, find another way to boost your twitter update count other than beating the oh so dead IE6 horse.
Everyone is as sick of hearing about it as you are of solving it. It is like the ever-present bad beat story of web development.
Stop Supporting in order to Stop Complaining
You are in control of your own IE6 bugs, after all you wrote the HTML/CSS that is causing them. If people were serious about never wanting to deal with these problems they would take it upon themselves to never write code that causes them.
Here are some things to keep in mind when stressing about IE6:
- Test early and often – Check your code at major design milestones to see if you have gone off track.
- Learn from past mistakes – Which HTML/CSS combinations got you in trouble the last time?
- It doesn’t need to be 100% – Determine an acceptable level of IE6 compliance and stick with it.
- Analyze your visitors – Don’t waste your time fixing problems for a small audience
IE6 is not going away for a while, even as IE7 ships with each new copy of Windows. There will still be a lot of people using IE6 and that’s okay, the web doesn’t need to work 100% of the time for everyone in every scenario. I am okay with a user in IE6 seeing a slightly different amount of padding around a box or a little extra border at the bottom of my header.
Perfect the Important Things First
You should strive to make fixing IE6 bugs the last improvement possible. Doing so ensures that your usability, architecture, design and content are the best they possibly can be. If you can achieve that level of excellence your clients will love you, their sites with thrive and you will have something to to tweet about.
