With 3 circulating versions of Internet Explorer, how important is IE6?
With IE8 in public beta, how important would you consider IE6, not for a general web site, but for an application for an IT-related hardware appliance which is not public? Thanks.
Good Answers (7)
Søren S
Experienced B2C eCommerce Consultant
Best Answers in: Web Development (2), Internet Marketing (1)
Generally speaking, IE6 is very important! My own studies into this shows that people have been very slow to adopt IE7 for some strange reason, infact 1/3 of all IE visitors to the sites I have access to, still use IE6.
I've previously published an article about this on my own blog, and allthough the data is from the beginning of 2007 it seems like the trend is continuing to flatten out:
http://www.afdeling18.dk/blog/udbredelse-af-internet-explorer-7-i-danmark.aspx
(It's in Danish I'm afraid, but you should still be able to read the graphics).
I'll be doing another study as soon as the next beta of IE8 hits the streets. So far IE8 can hardly be tracked in my analytics software, so few visitors are using it so far.
Hope it helps, otherwise do let me know!
If you can control the environment in which the appliance works eg. all users have the same IE version and your IT department makes regular updates to the client machines I would forget about IE6 and make the application IE7+ compatible.
The main difference between IE7 and IE8 will be in the javascript handling and minor or no differences in the rendering of HTML/CSS.
If the application runs on MS SharePoint then you would lock the app for the IE7 by inserting this code into the page
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />
so IE8+ will behave as IE7.
The best way would be to code to web standards (X)HTML/CSS and to use DOM scripting.
It depends on your target audience.
you need to look at your site traffic, or traffic patterns for similar sites. In general large corporations will have a standard controlled platform.. but if that is IE6 or 7 will vary by industry and by company. Our unit uses IE6 exclusively due to compatibility issues with IE7 for some key applications.
On my team we favor open standards, and multibrowser testing.
For the development my team does we try to target only standard HTML/CSS standards, we try to avoid iframes, activeX, vbscript and other IE specific architectures. And then test on the various IE/Safari/Firefox platforms.
an added benefit of that approach is your development is automatically more suited to mobile web usage.
David K
President at Confluent Forms LLC
Best Answers in: Web Development (7), Starting Up (2), Software Development (2), Internet Marketing (1), Business Development (1), Graphic Design (1), Lead Generation (1), Writing and Editing (1), E-Commerce (1)
Unfortunately, I think you still need to support it... and by support it, I mean make sure that whatever you deliver just doesn't look like crap on it.
I think somewhere around 40% of all IE users are on IE 6. This number is slowly shrinking, but it's not because they are slow browser adopters, but because their OS might not support IE 7. Some of my older laptops are still running Win2k and Win2k server, both of which prohibit me from running IE 7 on them. Then again, Firefox is my primary browser...
If the app is internal you have much more leeway to say "this application is optimized to run on such and such a browser". I think it's fair to say to your internal staff, "guys, update your browsers or use Firefox".
-David
Brian B
Technical Lead, Business to Business Web Applications at HighBeam Research
Best Answers in: Web Development (4), Small Business (2), Computers and Software (2), Direct Marketing (1), Professional Networking (1), Franchising (1), Starting Up (1), E-Commerce (1)
Like it or not, ie6 remains an essential browser.
YMMV but every time we release something that is used by people at companies with big internal web apps, suddenly ie6 dominates our web stats.
Lots of internal corporate apps were tweaked to support ie6 back in 2002 and still use ie6 hacks.
Most of those hacks fail miserably in ie7, and depending on which of the "damned if they..." options the ie8 team picks, those ie6 browsers may be here a lot longer.
Jeffrey P
Sr. IT Specialist (INFOSEC) at US Department of Transportation
Best Answers in: Staffing and Recruiting (1), Enterprise Software (1), Software Development (1)
your audiance will determine that. If I assume from you statement "IT-Related Hardware Appliance which is not public" that your are going to sell ti then I woud say that support for IE 6 is critical. What control of the accessing macnine do you have? If that assuemption is invalide then I would run from IE 6 to 7 as fast as possible. Lots of good reasons but increased security of 7.0 on VISTA is the main driver.
-jeff
I second what's already been said -- watch your web stats over time to see how many of your users are still browsing with IE6. In my experience, up to half of my sites' users are still using this browser.
You might find this website amusing--it's dedicated to "ridding the world of the scourge of the internet that is Internet Explorer 6".
http://www.savethedevelopers.org/
More Answers (4)
Colin S
Owner & Website Designer/Developer, Intrafusion Limited
Best Answers in: Web Development (1)
Well that depends upon your user base, bear in mind that security updates for IE are not available for the 12% of people who use versions of Windows older than Windows 2000 and IE7 is not available for anything older than Windows XP SP2.
You may want to have a look at Browser News: Statistics
Links:
IE6 is as important as your users think it is. You are talking about internal applications, but in my experience most companies I have created internal applications for continue to use IE6 regardless of how long IE7 has been out. The benefits of developing internal applications are that you can find out what your baseline browser you have to develop to is, so if no-one in the prospective userbase has IE6 installed you don't have to worry about it. However, if one person has it, you're stuck with it (unless you can convince them/IT to upgrade).
Caroline B
Web programming and production specialist, conceptual investigator - http://www.carolinecblaker.com
We all just want it to go away, but remember that the Windows audience consist of those folks who are not that computer literate who will not upgrade anything for fear of breaking stuff.
In the site statistics I've seen (maybe about 10 websites total this year - not a huge segment) about 33% of all users were still using IE6 - half the users of the total windows visitors we got. That's huge.
Keep an eye on your statistics, and on developer forums. I guarantee that once IE6 becomes less of a browser, you will see it in both places. Good luck.
If you have an issue with CSS or JavaScript, you can add content that is only loaded in IE6, by using:
<!--[if lt IE 7.]>
<script type="text/javascript" src="ie6fixes.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
You can see how I use it in this demo site to fix PNG transparency.
