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I don't know how to IE6

blog.colbyrabideau.com

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Re: I don't know how to IE6

#61

Post by nostrademons »

melling wrote: post #38
enjo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the domain. That two percent can be the difference between wildly profitable and failing. After all, Google still happily sells clicks to IE 6 users. If you're business relies on external ads and optimizing conversion rates, IE 6 remains a priority.

Google dropped IE6 support for YouTube over a year ago. They are dropping Google Apps support for IE7 on Aug 1st (that's today for some people reading this). For search results it's probably more worthwhile and not as hard to support the IE's but for their other apps they say they are only supporting that two most recent browsers.

Google Search dropped mainstream support for IE6 last fall. IE6 users are served a degraded experience that is roughly on-par feature-wise with Google Search as it existed in May 2010, and new features are no longer rolled out to IE6.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#62

Post by pedalpete »

melling wrote: post #15

2% of the US uses IE6. Explain that to your boss and ask if it's still necessary to support it. [Update] For Google Apps, Google no longer supports IE7. YouTube support for IE6 was dropped a year ago, and they make a lot of ad money from YouTube now.

I suspect that a large percentage of that 2% are business users who have an internal app which only works in IE6, and are therefore have to use it.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#63

Post by patio11 »

ilikepi wrote: post #25
kennu wrote: post #9

I hate web articles that don't have a publish date. This one would seem like a year and a half old.

It opened in a mobile-optimized view on my phone, and at the bottom it says, "2 hours ago." It's also listed under August 2011 on the Archive page. But I do agree that most blog posts are generally enhanced by the inclusion of the post date for context.

But if publishers actually follow that advice, they will find that people think the context is virtually invariably "old is bad" and watch their content get written off after a release window measured in days or, recently, hours.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#65

Post by pawelwentpawel »

emp_ wrote: post #44
pawelwentpawel wrote: post #7

"make it sure that it works on ie6" is the worst line you can hear at work. especially if you're developing a web app. even global websites like fb don't support ie6 anymore. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp - IE6 has 2.6%, I don't really see a point in spending hours optimizing stuff for it.

Linking w3schools for anything web is like linking FOX News for politics. *edit: more info http://w3fools.com/

Didn't know that. What would you suggest as a legit browser stats then?

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#66

Post by derleth »

true_religion wrote: post #49
mattdeboard wrote: post #3

Why did you have the impression a B.S. in CompSci would teach you about legacy browser support? I dunno, the first few weeks of my internship I had to do the same thing. If nothing else it was a great way to learn about what the company did by doing low-level grunt work. However I'd really recommend that if this is all you'll be doing for the duration of the internship, maybe look for something else. Otherwise be tha…

I hate to make a "me too" like post, but as soon as I read his biography, I thought "... wait we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too?". Are we now just leveling the playing field so experience is irrelevant, and kids just out of college should be able to compete with those who have been working the field for ages (ages which I might add included a time when IE6 was the…

> we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too?

No, we should look seriously at whether we need to keep doing things the cheap labor can't perform anymore.

Supporting IE6 is a Black Art, and keeping people who can perform Black Arts reliably is expensive. I suppose the traditional comparison is to COBOL codebases and greenscreen IBM development. If thinking about that convinces you IE6 isn't the mainstream anymore, go for it. The point is that increasing the number of different, and I mean really different, browsers your team has to know about is not free, as the cheap labor only knows the relatively tight cluster of post-IE6 graphical browsers. The article's the evidence of that.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#67

Post by [deleted] »

corin_ wrote: post #23
melling wrote: post #15

2% of the US uses IE6. Explain that to your boss and ask if it's still necessary to support it. [Update] For Google Apps, Google no longer supports IE7. YouTube support for IE6 was dropped a year ago, and they make a lot of ad money from YouTube now.

In terms of percentage that's pretty small, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. If you estimate the number of US internet users to be ~240 million, 2% is 4.8 million people. Sure, a small chunk of the pie, but still a large chunk of people. And, in a hypothetical situation where your % of revenue generating visitors is exactly the same as for the overall population, not many companies would want to lose 2% of t…

[deleted]

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#68

Post by [deleted] »

melling wrote: post #15

2% of the US uses IE6. Explain that to your boss and ask if it's still necessary to support it. [Update] For Google Apps, Google no longer supports IE7. YouTube support for IE6 was dropped a year ago, and they make a lot of ad money from YouTube now.

[deleted]

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#69

Post by pjscott »

derleth wrote: post #66
true_religion wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to make a "me too" like post, but as soon as I read his biography, I thought "... wait we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too?". Are we now just leveling the playing field so experience is irrelevant, and kids just out of college should be able to compete with those who have been working the field for ages (ages which I might add included a time when IE6 was the…

> we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too? No, we should look seriously at whether we need to keep doing things the cheap labor can't perform anymore. Supporting IE6 is a Black Art, and keeping people who can perform Black Arts reliably is expensive. I suppose the traditional comparison is to COBOL codebases and greenscreen IBM development. If thinking about that convin…

... and keeping people who can perform Black Arts reliably is expensive.

I have nothing to add ("me, too!"), but would like to point out that this sounds like a line from a fantasy novel written by an economist. If such a thing actually exists, I would love to hear of it.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#70

Post by danenania »

corin_ wrote: post #23
melling wrote: post #15

2% of the US uses IE6. Explain that to your boss and ask if it's still necessary to support it. [Update] For Google Apps, Google no longer supports IE7. YouTube support for IE6 was dropped a year ago, and they make a lot of ad money from YouTube now.

In terms of percentage that's pretty small, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. If you estimate the number of US internet users to be ~240 million, 2% is 4.8 million people. Sure, a small chunk of the pie, but still a large chunk of people. And, in a hypothetical situation where your % of revenue generating visitors is exactly the same as for the overall population, not many companies would want to lose 2% of t…

2% may use IE6, but I'd guess that 2% uses the web WAY less than the other 98%. IE6 is probably 0.5% or less of total page views. As a group, IE6 users are also probably significantly less likely to spend money on the web.

Then there's opportunity cost. Time and budget spent on supporting IE6 could have gone into additional features. It's true that supporting IE6 is a business decision and it could be worth it for some companies, but even that 2% statistic makes IE6 seem a lot more relevant than it really is.

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