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Asked: 2026-05-11T12:58:24+00:00

I’m getting ready to start work on a new web project for a fairly

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I’m getting ready to start work on a new web project for a fairly large corporation.

For all their users, something like 17,000 people, they are all stuck with IE6. They plan to have everyone transitioned to IE7 by the end of the year, however the IT department is starting to push this promise back.

What I’ve been asked to do is to give the project sponsor some more ammo push back on this. However, my charismatic politician button seems to be broken. I’ve only been unable to come up with simple phrases, such as ‘IE6 is teh suck’ or ‘it will take me a million more hours to make it work in IE6 too’ and all of this may be true but it doesn’t really feel like a very mature statement to be making.

I guess what I’m looking for, is some kind of laymen’s way of explaining that yes we can support IE6 but I’m going to need some hazard pay, and support that fact with some kind of hard evidence it does indeed take many more hours to make something look right and work in both IE6 and IE7.

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  1. Quite a difficult task to do, as there might be other reasons why they are using IE6 until this date (other, conflicting software which relies on IE6).

    The first thing to do would be to identfy the problem that stops IT from doing the migration – if it’s not lazyness.

    • Maybe it is easier to ask them whether they would consider an ‘alternative browser’ to be installed (which wouldn’t affect the IE6 installs). But most administrators don’t like that idea, because Firefox doesn’t share data/configs with Windows Servers, but trade-offs might be made in favor of money.

    • Should there be no real obstacle, you might show them a real-life example how an average day for an IE6 developer would look like.

      1. Choose an UI-feature (combine all merits of IE6 to create one) that will work to cause the required issues for the next few steps.
      2. Show them how everything looks fine in ALL Browsers.
      3. Show them how it doesn’t look fine at all in IE6.
      4. Make it IE6 compatible.
      5. Show them how every other browser now produces a different/unwanted result.
      6. Fix it (with heavy workarounds) so that it now looks ‘ok’ in most of the browsers.
      7. Tell them that you will have to put this effort into ALL of your components/features and that they will have much higer production costs.

      Make sure to point out, that this would even happen if you would just compare IE6 to IE7. They may not ever switch to Safari.

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