Ask HN: What is your policy on IE6 development?

For my in-the-works site, I'm going with displaying a notification to IE6 users notifying them that the site may not work as intended on their browser and asking them to upgrade to Firefox/Chrome/Safari/IE8.

For me it just depends upon the type of site I'm working on.

In these competitive times you need to support as close to 100% of the sites user base as possible. If the site drops 10-12% to a rival because it lacks ie6 support thats not going to go down well at all.

I do like the car analogy, but if you have a 25 year old car & you can't get a newer one, it's rather harsh. You can get away with it as long as the percentage is low enough.

On backends (cms/admin areas etc) then this is were you can specify what browser can be used and ignore ie6 as long as you can explain why.

For my work projects ie6 is a must as it still registers around 10% of visitors. Personal projects tend to be more techy with virtually 0% ie6, so no need to support it.

I look forward to when I can ignore ie6 completely!

I am deprecating it quite aggressively now.

My policy for IE6 is: don't.

I think I'm in the minority, but I will fully support IE6 until it's less than about 5% of traffic to a website I'm working on. Once you know IE6's quirks, it's not that hard to work around them. I think the benefit of an additional 10% or 15% or web traffic outweighs a few extra hours of development. Again, it sounds like most people disagree, but I developed a somewhat complex ajax app back when there was only Firefox 2 and IE6 and it wasn't that bad. I'm not in charge of a big design studio, but that's my policy for side projects and part-time clients that I work for. They shouldn't have to care about IE6. It should just work for them.

If your website will have a tilt to "Enterprise Customers" (worker bees in Fortune 500s) in any way then you must support IE 6. You have no option.

Otherwise forget it for now. "Early adopters" are on the cutting edge (browser wise) anyway. You can always accommodate IE 6 bugs later on if the site "makes it".

I think that you have to look at the client's visitor profile before you make this decision. If a client's site sees 10%+ IE 6 visitors (and many of mine do), you can't simply say we're not going to support this technology.

Often I tell them that we will review the site in IE 6 and make sure that it's "functional" but we don't guarantee it will be pixel perfect unless they pay for the extra work.

Also I don't like the IE banner / alert option. Maybe you want to try to proselytize the death of IE6, but I don't think it's appropriate to force your paying clients to do the same.

I simply don't cater for IE6 anymore. Not for contract work or my own sites (IE6 use for my sites hovers around 3% and it wasn't until it hit 10% where I decided to not care for the browser). Hell, even my corporate dayjob is deprecating IE6 development (we're in the health insurance industry).

If I'm doing contract work I usually spit it out early that I won't be catering for IE6. It is up to them to figure out whether the lack of an IE6-friendly frontend would harm them or not (I deal mostly with the same clients I've had for years, so they trust their metrics and me by now).

It hasn't happened yet, but if a client demanded I had to cater a project for IE6, I won't be afraid of firing them.

DO NOT WANT!

every advertiser i've worked with requires IE6 compatibility. so, theres that to keep in mind.

I agree that without a very frank up-front discussion about IE6 limitations, you'll find yourself redoing PNGs as GIFs and writing some conditional CSS hacks the night of launch when the client's sister boots up her Compaq to check out the cool new site.

NN 4.x stayed around forever BECAUSE we supported it, and IE6 will do the same. We have met the enemy, and they are us.

I generally just make sure that the website is functional in IE6. If an element is bumped/ aligned or distorted in some way (and is still usable) it doesn't get fixed.

The solution is very simple. Pricing.

Give your client two prices: one with IE6 support, the other without. Give honest prices based on the genuine overhead of working with IE 6.

If the client is willing to pay for IE6 support, fine, do the work you are being paid for. Let the cash decide the future of IE6

...but this is another example of developers making decisions that they should be making. For example, a software developer that decides to build a system with full database independance (hibernate for example) COULD be doing the right thing, but could simply be driving up project costs for requirements that never existed.

Developers - DONT make these decisions, price the options and ask the client.

Our IE6 support policy was tell all our paid up clients 6 months before 1st Jan 2010 that we'll be dropping IE6 support. We have a 6 month lead on changes.

The only complaints we have are from people with heavy Citrix on Win2k investments as IE7+ isn't supported on Win2k and some people who are so poorly invested that they don't want to upgrade (bad client indicatorpotentially)

The basic outcome is that we won't do anything crazy that destroy it intentionally, but if it breaks, you will have to pay us extra to fix it.

We're a product company, so it's a slightly different stance. However, we made a conscious decision early on not to support IE6 for the following reasons:

1. Our app is very interactive, and we didn't want to have to deal with incompatibilities.

2. Our target market is (primarily) software developers working for small companies. The only people that use IE6 are people who don't know any better or who are forced to do so, and there are few of those in our target market.

We know that we're probably losing some sales due to our lack of IE6 support, but for the reasons stated above, we're going on the assumption that the additional sales wouldn't offset the cost of development and testing.

I think for a consulting company, it depends on the project. If you're writing something for general consumption or enterprisey software shops, it's much more important (unfortunately) to support IE6.

We're down to 37% IE these days. Only 8% are IE6, for a total of under 5% IE6 usage.

I don't really know what the difference is between our site and the sites that say they have 65% IE still... it's not at all oriented towards techy type people. We have 45% FF and 15% Safari.

It's a significant enough number of people to test new features with IE6, but not enough to go wild trying to make it perfect. If I was developing sites for clients, I'd go for option #1.

Guestlist (http://www.guestlistapp.com) does not support IE6 even in the slightest (except for the public page where you buy tickets, that works in IE6). We support IE7 and higher, and that will probably stay that way for the foreseeable future.

As for contract work, I do whatever the client asks. I do let them know that IE6 support will probably cost them an additional 20% in my time, and it will not be identical to modern browsers. It will work and that is about it. If they want to spend the money it is up to them. They do know their customer base better than I do.

Let your competitors eat the cost of IE6 dev then

Always charge as LEAST as much as is required to make you either not care or actively want the client to buy a feature

So if IE6 makes the site 2x as difficult, charge them for the site using modern browsers, and line item (basic IE6 testing for at least limited functionality) at whatever price makes you not care.

Charge for them to maintain an outdated site, charge a lot. Then you won't care if they want IE6 support or not

Well, #1 and #2 aren't mutually exclusive.

In our experience, IE6 users are simply unwilling -- or more to the point, unable -- to upgrade. The people who come to mind are parents whose kids have moved away, office workers, unfortunate souls in school systems or other non-profits that don't have a decent IT budget, etc.

My shop leans towards #1 and will include IE6 "compatibility" separately. This works well for our clients since IE6 is rarely being used by the people that our clients' sites are built for.

Unless we're explicitly asked not to, we use a banner-style alert as a general practice in order to encourage upgrades. We use IE6Update:

  http://ie6update.com/

On a side note, Microsoft's "Browser for the Better" campaign was actually pretty helpful because we could say that upgrading to IE8 was feeding hungry families:

  http://browserforthebetter.com/

I operate an English language learning site, and we have one demographic that has a staggering amount of IE6 usage: 66% of our Chinese user base is using IE6. Needless to say, we continue to support IE6.

I will create a site that is designed for newer browsers. I am not going to forbid IE6 usage like I have seen other sites do. "Your browser is not welcome here, please upgrade." Instead, if IE6 works, it works. If not, I am not going to worry about it.

The most professional option, in my opinion, is to make sure your designs are at least basically functional in IE6, but put making IE6 a design priority as a separate line item with it's own cost. Doing extra work deserves extra billing, and you owe it to your clients to give them a choice.

Maybe another way of looking at the problem: I think a bigger challenge would be supporting mobile devices.

Whatever your site does, you might need to also do it in a stripped down no-frills way that will render well on a tiny screen.

If you can manage that, IE6 support should be no problem. Worst case, push IE6 users to your mobile site. :)

Not supported.