Blog calendar
— or —
... and more
Blog tags
05 Feb 2009 08:12
If there is a single thing that web developers hate most, it is probably Internet Explorer 6. It is buggy, it is outdated, it does not follow most of web standards and the most important thing is that… people still use it.
From my estimate, when creating initial version of Wikidot, making it work in IE 6 took extra 30% of total development time. Today, when adding functionality to Wikidot, special care must be taken to make sure it works with outdated browsers like IE6.
Come on, why do we have to support browser that was released in 2001 and never really evolved since then? The problem is that many people, with older hardware and older versions of Windows, simply do not bother to upgrade their browser, "because it still works". Also, in many corporate environments internal policies lock employees to use specific versions of software, including web browsers.
Hopefully, as I look at Dec 2008 statistics for Wikidot usage, only 15% of our traffic comes from IE6. IE7 accounts for 25%. This is good. Do not take me wrong — IE7 is not that much better than IE6 when it comes to standard compliance, but it is much much better.
Here is the full browser usage stats for Dec 2008:
Browser | Hits | Percent |
---|---|---|
Firefox | 46881021 | 45.3 % |
MS Internet Explorer | 43449910 | 42 % |
Opera | 4314782 | 4.1 % |
Safari | 3073337 | 2.9 % |
Chrome | 2677587 | 2.5 % |
Mozilla | 1507299 | 1.4 % |
Unknown | 537899 | 0.5 % |
Netscape | 257150 | 0.2 % |
Konqueror | 89621 | 0 % |
Others | 365660 | 0.3 % |
So, Firefox is the clear winner. This is good. Chrome does surprisingly well as for a new browser in the market.
So with IE6 accounting only for 15% of the traffic, when can we drop support for it? This is the question that a lot of people ask.
I would say — for Wikidot.com, not anytime soon. But if we decide to create any new product, IE6 will not be supported for sure.
And the reason I am writing about IE6 today is that I discovered a nice website, http://idroppedie6.com/ :
It is a list of sites that actually dropped support for IE6. I was quite surprised to see http://gmail.com on the list. Still the website is not extremely popular, I wish them good luck.
As a conclusion I think that in 2010 IE6 support among new websites will be marginal. Web evolves, there are so many great new technologies, solutions and patterns that would simply take too much time to make them work with IE6. Would developers spend 30% more time on their project trying to reach extra 10% of users?
Here is a nice chart created by Asa Dotzler:

rating: 1, tags: ie6 web
Please, please, please! Let's stop supporting IE6 today… I can't take it anymore :)
In fact a few of our users actually depend on our IE6 support.
Why break something that works? And all our client-side libraries (YUI, JQuery, our CSS templates) still support IE6 and currently the cost of supporting it is not that high. But for a new product - yes, I would drop IE6 without looking back.
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
You know what? Everybody that uses Internet Explorer would use it with the internet, right? And Google is definitely one of the most popular websites in the world.
What if Google manufactured a virus that when you access one of their sites, it downloads and runs a program to destroy IE6 and replaces it with Mozilla Firefox? Google knows which web browser's are reading their websites; so when an IE6 browser taps into Google, Google will initiate a download (probably positioning the user to click "accept program from Google" and run it).
Muahahaha! Our problems would be solved!
I found IE6 really hindered my learning of CSS. Things weren't working and I couldn't work out why… then I realised why everybody hated IE.
Just found this: http://www.onenaught.com/posts/44/microsofts-internet-explorer-slows-down-web-development
And a nice chart:
Good luck!
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
http://piotr.gabryjeluk.pl/dev:problems-with-internet-explorer
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
I'm still fairly new to Wikidot and am only just beginning to consider playing around with CSS. However, because all of my web work is done on the computers of the organisation I work for (a university), I am locked in to IE6 (until we upgrade).
Dave
David, I have a similar issue but have overcome it by using the portable usb version of Firefox from http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable which works well, although it's a bit slower and occasionally a bit unstable. Of course this won't work if the USBs on your desktop have been disabled.
Rob
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
Thanks for sharing this nice article. I read it completely and get some interesting knowledge from this. I again thanks for sharing such a nice blog.