Hello, I've got a coder doing some work on my site. Here's the problem. The works looks great in IE8 and FF3.6.2. But it looks HORRIBLE (unreadable) in IE6 and IE7. Should I insist he make it compatible for IE6 and IE7? Don't people still use these older browsers? Is it difficult to make it compatible? Thanks for your replies.
All versions of IE are the worst on the planet. IE8 alone has 5 rendering modes, none of which work like any of the other far more modern browsers. Plus, IE8 does not work like IE7 compatibility mode which doesn't work like IE7 which doesn't work like IE6. While support for IE6 has been dropped by Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others, some still have a significant portion of their visitors using that awful thing but supporting it only encourages those users but holds back your site from implementing modern standards and practices. Dealing with IE8 and IE7 is bad enough but IE6 is just awful. More people use IE8 and IE7 and Firefox than use IE6. In my business, for IE, I only support 7 and 8. If you want IE6 support, there's a 30% premium. I already know if you want IE6 support, the number of hours it will cost you will be 30-50% more than with the other browsers. I could only wish that you would insist on IE7 and IE8 support, along with the other more modern browsers, and forget IE6, but that's a call you will have to make. Your developer and/or host should be able to tell you what percent of your users visit using IE6.
As far as I'm concerned it is unacceptable to drop support for IE6 and especially IE7. I'm not a fan of IE browsers either, but I'm just being realistic. A significant portion of internet users still use IE6 for one reason or another. This doesn't mean that IE6 should necessarily get all the fancy new features the other browsers get, but it certainly needs to look decent and at least have the basic functionality. Let's face it, were not all big corporations like Google or Amazon. We need to make best use of all the traffic we get. You are paying for a web designer to build your site and should absolutely insist that it work in all browsers.
It's still 30% of my IE userbase, which means it's pretty much as many users as I get from firefox... (possibly more since firefox tracking can be flawed double or even triple counting users) especially since IE use is NOT ON THE DECLINE... Hell, IE6 and IE7 combined today is still more users than were using all versions of IE just six years ago... Don't let the rabid FLOSS fanboy agenda with their outright lies by omission propaganda trick you into thinking IE is any less relevant today when they start quoting percentages. Sure, IE has 'dropped' to 54% market share, but 54% of what? 54% of 2 billion is more than 90% of less than one billion. During the time they 'lost' 36% market share the IE userbase has GROWN by over 300 million users. Don't let the lazy sleazy anti-IE whackjobs and their FSF dirty hippie cousins trick you into thinking otherwise. While IE is bad - all of it's "badness" is well documented and fairly easy to code around if you have ANY **** clue what you are doing... and lands sake when it was released IE6 was the most standards compliant browser of it's day; which is why almost a decade later people are still using it and many people CANNOT switch off of it due to in-house crapplets at work that don't work right with newer versions of IE, people on legacy OS that don't support IE7 (which is a problem we'll be having with IE9) Yes, IE has a LOT of shortcomings and it's probably the worst of the browsers to try and support - but frankly: It's just NOT THAT *** HARD TO DO!!! Haslayout here, some simple coding choices made along the way, not letting the art *** who thinks drawing a pretty picture in photoshop actually think they have ANYTHING to do with making a layout, etc, etc. Quite frankly, anyone who can't be bothered to figure out the five to ten lines of extra CSS that doesn't even warrant a second stylesheet or any of that IE conditional comment bullshit is not being a professional developer. If they were to try to charge extra for it, I'd tell them to **** off and go find a REAL developer instead of some sixteen year old script kiddie still having life paid for by mommy and daddy. (you know, the FSF's bread and butter constituancy) Hell, 95% of layouts can be coded to work all the way back to IE 5.x with little or no REAL effort with a couple minor exceptions like menu dropdowns which would still function, they'd just look funny. IE6? That's EASY. Valid Doctype, a few haslayout triggers, maybe display:inline on one or two of your floats to prevent margin doubling, not placing your comments like a retard, an expression and maybe behavior file to make up for CSS 2.1 bits missing from legacy IE.... End of problem.. If the page was written properly in the first damned place, it shouldn't even take five minutes to 'fix'... Though if it was written and tested properly from the START, there shouldn't even be any extra time involved. From there you can even support IE 5.2 and/or 5.5 by following the simple rule of NEVER declaring width the same time as padding or border to get around the box model issue. Of course that it doesn't work in IE7 probably means that it's also broken in Opera and Chrome you just aren't seeing it yet, probably is more markup than is needed, probably broken on large font/120 dpi machines, and probably relies on a bunch of Firefux behaviors that are likely not even correct to the specification. There is NO reason for a page written to work in FF/IE8 to break in IE7 apart from bad coding choices/ineptitude on the part of the developer... Have we mentioned I have never once needed an IE conditional comment or that compatibility string bull for ANY of my CSS based layouts? That's from making GOOD choices and not just vomiting up code any old way using garbage tools like Dreambeaver. Care to share a URL? We can review how badly you are being screwed by your "developer's" ineptitude.
Assuming it's not a new site, and assuming you can trust your own numbers. Why can't you trust your own numbers? Because if the site doesn't work right in ___fill in the blank___ browser, what makes you think you are going to have meaningful numbers of visitors from said browser. Forgetting IE6 is premature, and is at this point number-wise still over 15% of the browsing public by most figures. When you are talking 15% of over 2.2 billion people, get off your lazy **** ass and support them!
Can anyone tell a good reason why IE6 users to day don't bother upgrading? I'm just curious to hear the IE6 browser supporters.
There are really three major groups that have some overlap... and a fourth minor group that's small - but vocal. The first group are the poor/disinterested/huddled masses. You're going to be asking the same question when IE9 hits since M$ has already said there will be no IE9 for XP. In that same light there is no IE7/newer for win2k/winME/98 users. Not everyone can afford to spend the equivalent of three months worth of groceries every three years, so there's always about 15% of the public that lags as much as a decade behind the rest of us... It's kind of the same problem as the people in the small towns 40 miles north of my current home; I can get broadband here - I go 40 miles north, and 33.6K dialup as a long distance phone call is a good day. Large expanses of the US are still without the option of broadband, or the option of it at reasonable prices... Likewise not everyone has the extra income to buy a new computer more than once a decade, if even a lifetime... Though nettops are making a real dent with that crowd; Do I bill someone for $300 in labor and parts to keep their old POS Win98 Athlon 600 going, or suggest they spend $200 on a Acer Revo to replace it. Gee, let me think. Our second group are people at work where the IT department has them 'locked into' IE6 without even the option to use anything else. Corporate IT departments move at a speed that often makes government look like a march hare... This is because they put huge investments into the proprietary software they run which quite often doesn't work on newer versions of IE. When ActiveX was first introduced along with opening the Trident API so any programmer could call it - that was one of the factors that made coders abandon Netscape like rats deserting a sinking ship. Even some anti-virus software (both Norton's and McAfee) used Trident (the engine inside IE6) to render their dialog boxes (ironic, no? An antivirus that depends on the most commonly infected software on a computer?). Newer versions of IE quite often break these legacy applications that these businesses rely upon every day. Hell, many large online business softwares, like the MLS (Multiple Listing Systems) commonly used by realtors still don't work right in IE7 or 8 and don't work at ALL in Opera/FF/Safari/Chrome/anything else from reliance upon ActiveX. (you can make good money going around to realtors and installing Tredosoft's IE6 standalone BTW). Third we have handheld users. Windows Mobile 6.5's big claim to fame is having it's engine based on IE6 instead of a IE 5.5/5.2 hybrid - yes, you heard me right; Internet Explorer Mobile didn't get updated to the IE6 engine until LAST YEAR. Did you miss the "6 on 6" marketing campaign? That's ok, so did everyone else... This is made worse by many handhelds having the code stored in ROM, meaning there isn't even the option TO upgrade it... or Flash Rom, which can be upgraded but goes beyond the skillset of the average business Dee Dee Dee user who all they know about the internet is "Duh, I click on the big blue E" All three of these groups overlap into the "It's been ok for a decade, why do I need to change?". MOST of the stuff like 'standards compliance', simplicity of code, even stuff like 'speed of rendering' and all these other common complaints only matter to DEVELOPERS. Joe Sixpack sitting at home watching NASCAR while shtupping his step daughter could really give a flying purple fish about ANY of that. They're sitting at home rubbing one out to german spanking porn in Realplayer format on a 1.2ghz Thunderbird running WinME with no service packs - knee deep in malware/spyware from browsing 'questionable' subjects - and completely oblivious that there is ANYTHING wrong with their computer; Frankly, they don't care. That's Joe user. As the technically inclined, we who frequent forums like this (I'm assuming) understand these subjects... As such, we often forget that the average person has neither the time or inclination to understand ANYTHING we are talking about in terms of standards, development or security. They don't give a ****, and if you try to 'educate' them they are just going to think of you as an elitist techno-snob berating them for their ignorance. That fourth group, well - Mac users. IE 5.2 is the ONLY version of IE available for the Mac, and MANY Mac users still resort to it since many websites; Like their bank, or their mortgage company, or their own business (Again, see realtors) - don't work right in Firefox, Opera, Chrome or Saffy. So there are still plenty of legitimate reasons to support IE6, and even put SOME effort towards making sure the page is at least USABLE in IE 5.x - failing to do so right now is ignorant, lazy, shortsighted, and effectively telling somewhere around 400 million people to **** off. That's worse than telling the 3% or so of Opera users to shove it like Google regularly does with their ineptly coded javascript on **** like gMail. (...any wonder they are putting so much effort into a faster javascript engine? It's their fix for not being able to write efficient javascript, embracing bloated bullshit libraries like jquery or simply lacking the common sense to avoid the temptation of using it when it's not appropriate!) Remember, always ask "percentage of what" - when that percentage still comes out to MILLIONS of people, don't go around pissing off MILLIONS. That's bad for business.
People are still using older versions of the browser. the web page should be compatible with all the browsers.