Who supports IE 6 these days?

[Pc_Madness]

Hey, I was working on a project recently and pretty much had to ditch IE 6 support as to make it work would be just to much effort, which of course made me jump up and down with glee, and got me wondering if anyone else is doing the same these days? I've never really got why people have insisted on developing websites that can support all the way back to IE 3 or whatever, and since IE 6 just fails so badly at everything. The number of users is still pretty high though I think? :\

Anyone know what the % of users are that use IE 6 these days?

* By where possible I mean you develop the site and make some changes so that it will work, but aren't bothered if some parts don't render 100% correctly. :)

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

oh cus of all the xml goodness, i see

I'm still sending it as HTML, the original test file's pure XML though (the doctype's only there to appease the W3C validator)

http://alex.thefrapp.com/files/blog/blog.xml

[primexx]

I'm still sending it as HTML, the original test file's pure XML though (the doctype's only there to appease the W3C validator)

http://alex.thefrapp.com/files/blog/blog.xml

haha nice

[rajputwarrior]

i'm working on a website right now, and i really wish i wasn't...

[primexx]

i'm doing a redesign for a group atm too and i originally intended to support IE6, but given the new development of Norway, I'm going to drop IE6 support in favour of what they are doing.

I guess it helps that it's a university audience and IE6 accounts for less than 10% of the visitors.

[karma]

10% is still a lot of people!! Thats discrimination!!!!! You are browserist :ninja:

[primexx]

hahahaa

[Hak Foo]

Why not use conditional comments to get rid of IE users.

<!--[if lt IE 7]>Please go to hell, IE6 user.<![endif]-->

[hp88]

Unluckily IE6 somewhat stands still because many long-term IE users disliked the sharp changes in user interface IE7+ brings, an unseen trend in previous updates (as least as I recall from IE4/5).

But luckily some web-based applications and some websites are warning users to update IE6 browsers, so I think most of hardcore IE6 users are facing or will face the transition to a different client, and probably not longer an IE* one!

[DDStriker]

If you care about IE, don't use it.

I used to send my site as XHTML to Gecko, WebKit and Opera, and text/html to everything else (IE included), of course IE couldn't render anything apart from the background colour, so I sent a small message just for IE users telling them to use something decent.

Its ok if you don't know how to support ie6 properly but restricting access to those who still use it is just plain stupid who are you to decide their browser is inferior coding for ie6 doesn't require that much extra effort there may be some llittle problems here and there but overall its not that hard

you may not like IE in general but not everyone likes firefox :p

As soon as IE8 comes out I plan to block anything older than 8.

Well atleast you'll get to see your website :p

And what the hell does that have to do with this thread?

everything it shows that ie6 is a nice simplistic, fast browser while the others are not (well i guess chrome is pretty fast aswell and simplistic i hope they keep it that way)

i like the chrome browser its fast and theres plenty of viewing space i still have ie6 installed as i don't really need ie7 and ie6 does the job (if some web 2 sites won't load i'll just use chrome)

only time i use firefox is when i'm developing since it has a useful plugin called firebug...but hell if they could implement that in chrome i'd never use firefox again (chromes implementation of it sucks at the moment)

[~ Rogue ~]

Hey, I was working on a project recently and pretty much had to ditch IE 6 support as to make it work would be just to much effort, which of course made me jump up and down with glee, and got me wondering if anyone else is doing the same these days? I've never really got why people have insisted on developing websites that can support all the way back to IE 3 or whatever, and since IE 6 just fails so badly at everything. The number of users is still pretty high though I think? :\

Anyone know what the % of users are that use IE 6 these days?

* By where possible I mean you develop the site and make some changes so that it will work, but aren't bothered if some parts don't render 100% correctly. :)

As a web developer, IE is the bane of my existence. IE7 and Firefox3 are the only browsers I generally code for and offer support for (including Safari, and the other good ones). I tend to stop respecting out-dated software when I code.

[MrA]

To have a valid XHTML website you need to send your website as "application/xhtml+xml" instead of "text/html", your server will send every page as "text/html" unless you it tell otherwise.

But IE doesn't support XHTML in the valid way and the only reason why XHTML send as text/html works in IE is because IE loads it in HTML and hopes for the best, which isn't support XHTML but its a start anyway.

The reason given for the lack of XHTML support in IE is that the team wants a fully working XHTML rendering engine, and not something that was put together in a few hours. Also there still no set date on when IE will support XHTML yet.

Although, I still recommend on using XHTML just make sure you use something like my code before. :)

That's pathetic considering they've had 9 years to do it. Although I'm not really surprised since they've had almost 11 years to attempt CSS2 (yes, I know CSS2 has bugs, but MSFT could have at least tried), and it took 10 years to do PNG. At this rate, I'll expect SVG in 2013, and HTML5 in 2019.

As for supporting IE6, my web dev doesn't extend beyond outputting simple HTML using printf from a C++ program.

[primexx]

Its ok if you don't know how to support ie6 properly but restricting access to those who still use it is just plain stupid who are you to decide their browser is inferior coding for ie6 doesn't require that much extra effort there may be some llittle problems here and there but overall its not that hard

you may not like IE in general but not everyone likes firefox :p

you'll find that most of us do this only on our personal sites, in which case we can tell IE users to update or go screw themselves without loss.

Also, you don't have to like Firefox, all modern browsers support XHTML.

Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari

your choice is plenty

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Its ok if you don't know how to support ie6 properly but restricting access to those who still use it is just plain stupid who are you to decide their browser is inferior coding for ie6 doesn't require that much extra effort there may be some llittle problems here and there but overall its not that hard

you may not like IE in general but not everyone likes firefox :p

...

Their browser is inferior for well defined technical reasons. It's not just because I don't like it.

And that page works fine in Firefox (so Gecko) and Safari (so Webkit) and I'm assuming Opera as well.

[Sandor]

its pretty easy to get a semblance of PNG support in IE6

takes about 2 minutes http://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/demo/

[Colin-uk Veteran]

I still use IE6 as my default web browser, yes really :p

but i do agree its annoying trying to code your pages to work well in it, but using javascript to block certain user agent strings in useless. i have my user agent string set to Identify as firefox so it doesnt block me :p

Conditional IE6 tags do though, thats the way you should do it :p or output your pages as .xhtml, IE6 doesnt support that filetype, but firefox does, im not sure about any other browsers :p

[Trix.Neo]

its pointless going out of your way to exclude IE or IE6 (Like the other thread, it doesn't take much to support IE6 really) if you don't want to build the site and let it break and use a conditional statement to just explain your reasoning so at least IE6 users know why your otherwise well designed site looks pants in their browser.

[thealexweb]

I still use IE6 as my default web browser

Oh dear.