I'm starting to sound like a broken record:
Serve your mobile version to IE6 users.
Don't Stop Supporting IE6
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Don't Stop Supporting IE6
#12The tone is overly-bombastic, but there's the seed of a good idea in here. Getting the a consistent look in FF3 and IE6 is Sisyphean; making a IE6-only layout much easier. The author recommends dropping the whole "one app, one look" conceit and shuffling the dinosaurs to a dinosaur pen, with a simpler layout and the same content (you have been separating content and presentation, right?).
There is definitely some bombast there. I've been fed up with folks displacing their frustrations onto users instead of getting creative and practical with the issue.
I've been in this game a long, long time and I saw (and, admittedly, took part in) the "insult and block" approach with Netscape 4. Looking back, it was immature, cocky and lazy. I hate seeing people repeat the same childish mistakes. Instead, we can build an economic model to decide how to classify each user agent for each property we control and act accordingly. It's not emotional or dogmatic - just practical.
To paraphrase a reply to a comment on my site:
I think my approach helps bring innovation while continuing to support the people stuck on less modern user agents.
Reclassifying IE6 into the category of feed readers, screen readers, and printers is a perfectly viable solution.
Oppose that to the childish antics behind blocking content based on user agent.
In each case, you get to provide interesting experience design for modern user agents, but only by reclassifying IE6 for content support do you also retain (some portion of) the IE6 audience.
Re: Don't Stop Supporting IE6
#13Cost: Extremely high Benefit: Non-tech savy users can check out my tech business Are IE6 users the kind of people that will buy your product, utilize your social media, read your content? If they haven't upgraded to something better yet and it's FREE to replace and has been for years, what are the odds that they will pay for your service. Quality of eyeballs matters more than quantity of eyeballs, and I would say tha…
If they haven't upgraded to something better yet and it's FREE to replace and has been for years, what are the odds that they will pay for your service.
Seeing as the majority of IE6 users are in the enterprise market... I'd say the odds are pretty good.
Re: Don't Stop Supporting IE6
#14Cost: Extremely high Benefit: Non-tech savy users can check out my tech business Are IE6 users the kind of people that will buy your product, utilize your social media, read your content? If they haven't upgraded to something better yet and it's FREE to replace and has been for years, what are the odds that they will pay for your service. Quality of eyeballs matters more than quantity of eyeballs, and I would say tha…
If they haven't upgraded to something better yet and it's FREE to replace and has been for years, what are the odds that they will pay for your service. Seeing as the majority of IE6 users are in the enterprise market... I'd say the odds are pretty good.
What is the cost of serving them a plain jane experience, as you do with a printer or feed reader? If you can model your audience and quantify the impact (in other words, prove your theory) for your audience, why BLOCK THEM? Just give them the content, minus the design. Spend the same amount of time you spend on your print.css file.
Anything more restrictive than that is not about income, as you suggest - it's about dogma.
Re: Don't Stop Supporting IE6
#15I'm starting to sound like a broken record: Serve your mobile version to IE6 users.
Nah, serve something closer to a print version and focus some real time on badass mobile support!
Re: Don't Stop Supporting IE6
#16I'm starting to sound like a broken record: Serve your mobile version to IE6 users.
Nah, serve something closer to a print version and focus some real time on badass mobile support!
Many sites don't really have anything worth printing. And if they did, few people use the print version unless your main version really is that awful. If you are already making badass mobile support (which includes A LOT of crummy old browsers on many many phones), you might as well save the effort of a print version.
Re: Don't Stop Supporting IE6
#17In fact, I believe we should support telnetters too. Hell, we should all have a help desk set up so that people that don't have a computer can call us up and interact with our web apps. Any good designer should be able to work within those constraints and still kick ass .
absolutely. and JAWS. oh wait, assistive tech. and accessibility don't fit into your [glib] analogy?
Not supporting someone who hasn't bothered to update his/her JAWS in the last 8 years doesn't seem completely unreasonable.
Re: Don't Stop Supporting IE6
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
absolutely. and JAWS. oh wait, assistive tech. and accessibility don't fit into your [glib] analogy?
Not supporting someone who hasn't bothered to update his/her JAWS in the last 8 years doesn't seem completely unreasonable.
feel free to read through this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man and re-read my reply to jsonscripter's comment.
Re: Don't Stop Supporting IE6
#19What a crock. Not being a dick to people let them sit in their stupid comfortable IE6 for the last 8 years blissfully unaware that they were holding back advancements that would make their lives better. If I try to run new software on Windows 95, it will slap me in the face and tell me to slag off. The same should hold true for the web. You go ahead and spend time delivering content to IE6 Toby, but I'm going to hop…
The idea they have been holding back for 8 years is wrong. IE7 came out in 2006, that's 3 years.
As is fairly normal people didn't switch to another browser because they were happy with what they had. They just haven't updated their version in 3 years, which is pretty normal with other types of software.
Re: Don't Stop Supporting IE6
#20I'm starting to sound like a broken record: Serve your mobile version to IE6 users.
Many mobile devices now use WebKit based browsers and easily kick IE's old ass.