Ask HN: Shall we hasten the demise of IE6 by charging more?

#1

Post by thorax » Fri, Dec 05, 2008, 10:45 PM UTC

We're debating displaying twice as many ads to IE6 users as we do to everyone else. For our pay web services, we're debating including an IE6 surcharge.

While we'd love to drop IE6 completely, it feels crazy to do so while it's still 20% of visits. But there is definitely a lot of extra development time needed to keep things working for older browsers.

In both cases, we'd make it 100% clear why they saw more ads and paid more, with instructions on how to upgrade.

If everyone did such a thing, maybe we'd see the financial/annoyance incentive lead them in the right direction to browsers that don't cost as much to support.

It's been a long week, so this may be a bit crazy, but I thought I'd get some discussion going as Friday comes to a close.

Re: Ask HN: Shall we hasten the demise of IE6 by charging more?

#2

Post by silentbicycle » Fri, Dec 05, 2008, 10:51 PM UTC

Just a suggestion: Consider instead framing it as giving a discount to people who use a newer web browser, since "they didn't require the extra work supporting older, buggy web browsers does" (or similar phrasing). It makes the same point, but may be less likely to make potential customers resentful.

Either way, you'll probably want to run this by a bunch of actual customers. People with the sort of personality quirks that draw them to (and make them good at) programming might respond to this very differently than customers/clients at large. Also, note that some people will not be allowed to change web browsers, e.g. for administrative reasons. (Whether or not they're good reasons is beyond your control.)

I don't know if it's a good idea from a business standpoint, but I like it.

Re: Ask HN: Shall we hasten the demise of IE6 by charging more?

#3

Post by stuartcw » Fri, Dec 05, 2008, 11:02 PM UTC

Make sure one of the ads is for Firefox... :-)

Re: Ask HN: Shall we hasten the demise of IE6 by charging more?

#4

Post by geuis » Fri, Dec 05, 2008, 11:04 PM UTC

I wonder if IE6 users are more prone to click on ads anyway. Overall, this is an interesting idea. If you implement it, follow up in a couple months with what the effects are. My company has thousands of pageviews a day, with about 25% being IE6. I would love to push this idea internally because A) it makes the marketing dept happier if we make more money and B) it makes me and the other front-end engineer happy.

Re: Ask HN: Shall we hasten the demise of IE6 by charging more?

#5

Post by thorax » Fri, Dec 05, 2008, 11:11 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #2

Just a suggestion: Consider instead framing it as giving a discount to people who use a newer web browser, since "they didn't require the extra work supporting older, buggy web browsers does" (or similar phrasing). It makes the same point, but may be less likely to make potential customers resentful. Either way, you'll probably want to run this by a bunch of actual customers. People with the sort of personality quirk…

Yeah, the way it's framed can be made easier, probably. The "discount perspective" is always easier to swallow.

What I'd like for us to do, as real businesses do, is to turn the discussion into one of costs and stop pretending to our community that IE6 support comes for free.

"You live in Canada and we have to charge you more because it costs us more to send our product to you."

People understand this-- it might not occur to them at first, but I think it might be a good idea to begin showing customers how they increase their own prices. The majority of IE6 users may not even know they cause the trouble they do.

Re: Ask HN: Shall we hasten the demise of IE6 by charging more?

#6

Post by twoism » Sat, Dec 06, 2008, 1:08 AM UTC

At my company we haven't found a way to charge more, especially with clients that have internal apps that will only work with IE6. What we have been doing is itemizing any hourly work spent on IE6 optimization (hacks). So, at least for clients with multiple projects in the works, it make them think twice about requesting IE6 support on their next project.

Re: Ask HN: Shall we hasten the demise of IE6 by charging more?

#7

Post by SwellJoe » Sat, Dec 06, 2008, 1:21 AM UTC

I've recently intentionally removed some of the hacks for making IE6 look sane in our apps. PNG transparency is the most obvious...so in IE6, our products have grey boxes around all the images. It still all works--nothing is impossible to do in IE6. It just looks stupid. This, of course, is the easiest thing to fix in IE6, so I'm still spending an inordinate amount of time making sure everything still works in IE6. But, it's my passive aggressive way to make it clear that IE6 is not an appropriate browser for modern applications.

I don't know that this does anything positive for the world, but it gives me a small piece of satisfaction. (Of course, IE6 is less than 5% of our users, so it's not really a revolutionary act.)

Re: Ask HN: Shall we hasten the demise of IE6 by charging more?

#8

Post by lionhearted » Sat, Dec 06, 2008, 1:27 AM UTC

This made me smile. I'm sure everyone who has built even a simple page has had the urge to break something after seeing their perfectly designed page in Firefox explode in IE6.

That said, you'll want to test on a small segment of your IE6 users before full implementation if possible. IE6 users are actually more qualified buyers a lot of the time depending on your industry. As a gross overgeneralization, IE6 users tend to pirate less, are less likely to be aware of competitors to your services, and might be more likely to be business customers at work depending on who you to sell to.

Re: Ask HN: Shall we hasten the demise of IE6 by charging more?

#9

Post by theantidote » Sat, Dec 06, 2008, 5:12 PM UTC

Definitely charge people extra for making intranet sites IE 6 compatible because they have control over that and they should upgrade. Otherwise you can consider a small surcharge for IE6 on internet sites but it's kind of unfair to punish your clients for the browsers their customers use because they can't really do much about it. On your own site more ads are okay along with copious upgrade links and links to Firefox/Opera.

Funny story: I've been working on a project for the past 2 weeks and I basically finished it in Safari and I was getting ready to do a long day or two of debugging for IE6 when I opened it up in IE6 and lo and behold it was (nearly) perfect! I was so happy, tears nearly ran down my face.