There's a debate raging on the Internet over the fate of Microsoft's eight-year-old browser, Internet Explorer 6. The essence of that fight is this: IE6 is a terrible, outdated browser; but many corporate and government IT departments still refuse to upgrade. Web developers are fighting to get IE6 dropped from the "supported browsers" list for their applications, and have launched a campaign here to try to convince IT managers of their cause.
The purpose of this post is not to choose a side, but to examine the question: "What should you do?" If you're creating a web application, should you include support for IE6? Or just consign it to the dustbin of history?
First, what makes IE6 so bad? Not all old things are intrinsically bad, after all. However IE6 is truly pretty awful, especially for web developers. It's non-compliant and breaks many standard pages. Here's a short video that explains it from the web developer's and project manager's perspective. The fact is, developing for IE6 DOES take a lot of extra work, since it sticks out like a sore thumb with its display problems (that even later versions of IE don't have). Multiply that extra work a few times: not just for development time, but setting up special development environments (remember, you can't really have more than one version of IE installed at a time without using virtual machines), test environments, and extra testing time.
Of course, maybe your app should run in IE6...maybe. A recent survey found that 70% of users of IE6 are still using it because their corporate IT department won't let them upgrade. So if that's your desired audience, then sure you need to support IE6.
Let's take a look at some numbers. W3schools.com publishes a good set of browser statistics by month, which you can see here. We can see that usage of IE6 reached an all-time high in November of 2003 (71.2%). Wow, that was a long time ago! Since then, the stats have wavered, but numbers for IE6 have generally continued to fall since then. In particular, let's look at the most recent numbers, for August, 2009:
IE6: 13.6%
IE7: 15.1%
IE8: 10.6%
Firefox: 47.4%
Chrome: 7.0%
Safari: 3.3%
Opera: 2.1%
Wow. First of all, the big winner in this list is obviously Firefox. At 47.4%, Firefox has more browser share than all versions of IE combined (39.3%). But even looking at the IE numbers on their own, IE7 has surpassed IE6; and IE8, which was only recently released, is already gaining on both of them. IE7 and IE8 combined account for approximately twice as many site visits as IE6.
So, we can see that IE6, in general, has a very small market share of browsers in use on the modern web. One could probably safely discard support for IE6 without locking out very many potential users. And if you examine the audience for your application, this may make even more sense. For example, if you're creating a dating site, you probably don't have to worry too much about IE6 - a lot of IE6 users are on large corporate networks where they won't be allowed to access dating sites anyway! Instead, those users will wait until they get home, where they probably have Firefox or IE7 installed. As people upgrade hardware and their operating systems, too, IE6 will become even more marginalized. While it was the default browser installed with Windows XP, anyone running Windows Update regularly will have been automatically upgraded to IE7 by now, if not IE8; Vista did not include IE6, and Windows 7 most certainly will not.
It may be time to "dump IE6" after all.
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