The IE 6 Debate

Up until the release of Internet Explorer 8 I was pretty open to making concessions for the ever-developer-haunting IE6. But now the debate with design partners and customers alike is should we still support it and if so should we make that an extra costs?

The issue at hand is that while IE8 and Firefox 3 (and other CSS compliant browsers) aren't exact when it comes to layouts, they are pretty dang close to each other and focusing on just those main two browsers is a pretty safe bet. Even IE7 wasn't that big of a problem, but IE6?

The big ticket problems with supporting IE6 are that it doesn't support the great PNG file format for images and that you have to create a separate stylesheet for this one specific browser. IE6 only holds about 15% of the browser market but one could argue that that's about the same as IE7 (IE across the board holds about 40%) and IE7 usage is dropping faster than IE6 since the introduction of IE8 (all according to W3CSchools.com). Of our site visitors 57% use IE but only 15% of those are using IE6 so overall only about 9% are using IE6. This 9% is also pretty consistent with the other customer sites we keep stats on, give or take 2-3%. A majority of the rest are IE7 users so this is totally different that what W3C is reporting.

So with the numbers from our sites I see a real case for no longer supporting it but I also see this as a frustrating debate that will not go away at least for another year or so.

If your a developer what do you think, do you still support IE6?