Let’s ignore ie6 already

Posted byLance Wiggs 9 Comments on Let’s ignore ie6 already
<UPDATE – I’ve created a page on the tab above – if you send me information then I’ll add to the HALL OF SHAME>

Microsoft’s new ie6 countdown site records ie6 usage of just 3.1% in New Zealand.

The overall number is now small enough for almost all local sites to ignore. I’m guessing that the holdouts are:

1: the occasional corporate with an IT department stuck in the past

2: A few folks with computers that have not been updated for 10 years and who are not savvy enough to download Firefox or similar

3: developers testing that their sites still work on ie6

I have no empathy for any corporates stuck on ie6 – it’s well beyond time to change – you are holding the rest of us up.

I feel for the second category, so what we need to do is make it simple for them to change. A banner as advocated by Microsoft’s site is a good idea.

As for the third? just forget about ie6 already – and focus your development efforts on making awesome websites that work on any modern browser.

Published by Lance Wiggs

@lancewiggs

9 replies on “Let’s ignore ie6 already”

  1. Lance I think the problem is corporate IT. Individuals will change. I suggest a name and shame campaign for corporates who still run IE6. They are costing our industry a lot of time and money.

    Rod

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  4. The main reason IE6 exists today is that corporates have old web applications that will ONLY run on this browser – back then it was common for applications to take advantage of a particular browser’s features – and IE was THE browser. So fair enough – keep IE6, we all pity you that.

    What’s inexcusable is that these same corporates have nonsensical policies that prevent their workers from installing an alternative more modern browser. Yes, people, you can install more than one browser on a machine ;0)

    It should be name, shame and educate.

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  6. Naming and shaming you say!

    Just whipped up a quick script, ran it over the log files of a site I’m involved with.

    grep “MSIE 6.0” access.log | awk ‘{print $2}’ | awk ‘ { arr[$1]=$0 } END { for ( key in arr ) { print arr[key] } } ‘ | nslookup | grep “name =”

    Basically looks through the Apache access logs for “MSIE 6.0”, filters out unique IP addresses and runs them through nslookup, displaying just the line with the rDNS. Not sure if it’s the best way to do it, but seems to produce some results.

    On the site I’ve run this one, I’ve picked up a few large NZ companies (along with countless of other names which aren’t relevant, of course):
    – Contact Energy
    – Department of Building and Housing
    – Waitemata DHB
    – Counties Manakau DHB
    – Henry Hughes (Attorneys)
    – Pan Pac Forest Products
    – New Zealand Refining Company

    Note that I don’t guarantee that these organisations are using IE6, and certainly not organisation wide – just something has been sending MSIE 6.0 as the user agent on requests from within their networks.

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    1. On further inspection I also notice:
      – Waikato DHB
      – Auckland DHB
      – Ministry of Education
      – Tasti

      I’d like to note that these statistics are NOT from a health related site (I’d classify it as “general interest”) so the large proportion of DHBs isn’t because of the subject matter…

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  7. While it is easy to scoff at IE6’s shortcomings, unfortunately for some websites, such as my employer’s site, still require resources to be spent on making their site behave nicely in IE6.

    For example, my employer’s has an average of 7-10% of visitors still using IE6 out of a total of roughly 11,000 total visits per day. Unfortunately that is still too many potential customers to turn away – so we have no other option than to spend the 20-60 hours of my time to make the site look decent in IE6. During some projects, I have spent more time fixing bugs in IE6 than the rest of the site.

    As a sidenote, I also work as a freelance web designer, and I completely ignore IE6 unless the client specifically requests it, at which time I will mention the extra hours required, meaning an increased cost for them.

    IE6 is nothing but trouble for everybody involved. It’s a lose-lose-lose situation (Michael Scott would not be impressed).

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