Are we supposed to find workarounds in our web applications so that they will work in every situation? Is it time to do away with IE6 programming?
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Are we supposed to find workarounds in our web applications so that they will work in every situation? Is it time to do away with IE6 programming?
This depends so much on the context of the application, and of its users. There are two key aspects: what browsers are your users using; and how important is it that they can access/interact with your site.
The first part is generally easily establish, if you have an existing version with stats (Google Analytics or similar is simple and great) or you have access to such data from a similar app / product.
The later is a little harder to decide. If you’re developing a publically availalbe, ad-sponsored site for exmple, it’s just a numbers game – work out how much of your audience you lose and factor what that’s worth against the additional development time. If, however you’re doing something specifically at the request of a group of users – like an enterprise web app for example – you may be stuck with what those users are browsing with.
In my experience those two things can change significantly for different apps. We’ve got web apps still (stats from last week) with close to 70% IE6 usage (20% IE7, the rest split between IE5.5 and FF2) and others with close to 0% IE6. For relatively ovbivous reasons, the latter are the kind of apps where losing a few users isn’t so important.
Having said all that, we generally find it easy to support IE6 (and IE5.5 as others point out) simply because we’ve been doing so for a while. Yes, it’s a pain and yes, it takes more time, but often not too much. There are very few situations where having to support IE6 drastically changes what kind development you do – it just means a little more work. The other nice benefit of supporting it (and testing for it) is that you generally end up doing better all-round browser and quirks testing as a result of the polarity of IE6’s behaviours.
You need to decide whether or not you’re supposed to find workarounds, based on the requirements of your app/product. That’s it’s IE6 isn’t really that relevant – this kind of problem happens all the time in other situations, it just so happens that IE6 is a great example of the costs and implications of mixed standards, versioning and legacy support.