Ask HN: do you support IE6? IE7?

2 points by hoodoof ↗ HN
So you are building your startup - what is lowest common denominator browser you will support?

7 comments

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I think it really depends on the industry.

As an example, the last company I worked at, our main customers were home contractors and other DIY type people and IE7 was a large portion of the market share.

My best advice is to build a product and check analytics to see how many customers are actually using older browsers. If it's a small group, its probably not worth the effort to make sure everything is ported over. Sometimes it can also be difficult to test older browsers without spending a bunch of time setting up VM's.

For my own personal projects, I dont even fully support IE7.

I work for a company that develops iOS games and interactive experiences for children. When we develop a website for a product, my ask of the developer is always "IE 6 support would be great, but I'm willing to trade that for a wow factor in all other browsers. You need to convince me that the trade off is worth it though."
Supporting IE7 is relatively easier compared to IE6 - so yeah, IE7 for me.

So far this year, no client asked for IE6 support.

IE6 barely even registers on our analytics reports anymore. At Improvely, 15 browsers identified as IE6 out of the last 30k site visitors, and I would bet at least some of those are just bots using IE's user-agent.

Since Microsoft stopped publishing their IE6 compatibility VirtualPC images, I've stopped testing sites in it. IE7 and up are supported, though things look prettier in IE9+.

P.S. I publish W3Counter's monthly browser usage share reports. Across the ~60k sites W3Counter tracks, IE6 is down to 0.7% usage.

http://www.w3counter.com/trends

I work for a development agency during the day and we don't support IE6 as a rule. IE7 and above only.
No way, well, in fact I won't support IE until they launch IE10, the first IE that gives support to HTML5
I work for the leading newspaper websites in my country.

IE6 is around 0.4% of traffic so no, we no longer support it. Even IE7 is barely being tested (3%), only if users complain will we take a closer look at fixing things for it.