Survey: Do you customers still use IE6? Can we drop support? (Post Here!)

Just one more comment on this. It's pretty standard to have lower browser requirements for a website itself than for the content management system behind it. Since only a very small group of people uses the CMS, it's easier for them update. Where as a much larger audience is going to be using the main website.

So you might still design your website to support IE6, but require a more modern browser to use the CMS that powers it.

There's an interesting article here about how most IE6 users can't upgrade because they're at work (and their PC is locked down): http://blog.digg.com/?p=878

And a neat site here that lets you display an IE6 looking "Upgrade" slide down at the top of your pages (try the demo): http://ie6update.com/

This is a great question and one which plagues us daily!

Our 4 our of 5 of our key accounts are still tied to IE6 (and Office 97 for that matter). This introduces many frustrations on both sides of the equation.

Your point Dave about the managers of a CMS having access to higher level resources than what the public site must support is well taken. This is mostly the case in our situation. However, I can easily imagine some of my clients being unable to upgrade their browsers due to the IT restrictions of their (mostly govn't) workplaces.

From my perspective, continuing to support IE6 is a necessary evil. [:/]

J.

Here's a sample of users on a Texas County Government Website that had about 23,000 visitors since August 1st:


7.0 11,484 55.76%
8.0 5,810 28.21%
6.0 3,294 15.99%
5.5 3 0.01%

FF 2,250 9.49%
Chrome 149 0.63%

But out of all the admins for the CMS, none of them use 6.0 or less.

It won't effect me or the hundreds of users we have on CMS. I'll tell them they have to upgrade or use a different browser. I know everyone else has their demons on this issue, but I say Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 was released on August 27, 2001 and it's time to upgrade now! We are approaching 8 years.... updating a browser to a new version once every 8 years is not too much to ask....

Also - As of January 10, 2009, Secunia reports 142 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6, 22 of which are unpatched, some of which are rated moderately critical in severity

I may have found a stop-gap measure. There's a free javascript library here that makes IE6 emulate a standards compliant browser (mostly):
http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
http://ie7-js.googlecode.com/svn/test/index.html

It basically "fixes" the page on page load. Looks good so far, I'll do some more tests and report back.

Also interested in what anyone else has to say about IE6! :)

Thanks!

I don't feel the need to support IE6 with CMS Builder. None of my current CMS Builder clients are using IE6 and I can indicate browser requirements before going into any new projects.

Deborah

wow thanks Dave for the google code emulator.

I actually just load up a DIV with a conditional comment that pushes people to upgrade to IE7 or IE8 or FFX and to stop using a unsecure and probably hacked browser... in a nice way.

I have built about a dozen sites now with the CMSB form you guys and half of them I just need a jquery png transparency fix and others are a mess on IE6, even with CLEAN COMPLIANT code!!!
So I just drop support and don't include an IE6 only stylesheet. Tired of it.

and BIG thanks to whoever came up with the beautifully done IE6 drop-down warning bar.

http://ie6update.com/

love it.