Eight years on and Internet Explorer 6 is still important

Posted by Peter Labrow on 11 March 2009

If your website designer tells you that there’s no need to test your site in Internet Explorer 6 because it’s eight years old and long phased out, don’t listen. If your site doesn’t support Internet Explorer 6, you could lose up to a quarter of your audience.

An item on the cover of this month’s .Net Magazine (a publication for website designers and developers) caught my eye: it was asking if the time is right for website creators to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 when developing websites.

Like many Web developers, the idea of dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 is something I’d welcome with open arms. It’s almost eight years old, didn’t display HTML spectacularly well even when it was new, and now is so idiosyncratic alongside modern browsers (even Microsoft’s own) that testing for this browser can take as much time as for all other browsers combined.

The need to test Web pages in different browsers is something that many clients are largely unaware of. Different browsers (for one reason or another) can display Web pages in very different ways – something that’s clearly undesirable. Ever since the Web came into being, this difference in display between one browser and another has been the bane of every Web developer’s life – sometimes sapping more time in testing than was spent creating the page in the first place.

Of late, things have got much, much better. We are now blessed with a raft of standards-compliant browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, Safari – and even the more recent versions of Internet Explorer. Most standards-compliant HTML renders in pretty much the same way in each of these browsers.

But of course, we can’t just assume that everyone has the latest browser. People hang on to old software for one reason or another, and it can take some time before it’s safe to drop support for a particular browser. But since Internet Explorer 6 is nearly eight years old, and it’s free to download a replacement, surely it’s safe to put it out to pasture?

You’d think. But a quick look at some up-to-date website statistics show that a large proportion of people still browse using Internet Explorer 6 – possibly as much as a quarter of all people browsing (the data on StatCounter’s Global Stats shows that at the time of writing it’s 24.9%).

Some companies have stopped supporting Internet Explorer 6 – and their websites simply don’t work properly when using it. Some of these are large companies, some are smaller ones who want to go beyond what Internet Explorer 6 can do or perhaps reduce their development burden.

I think this is dangerous. Yes, I’d like people to pull their fingers out and download a modern browser. It would save me a lot of time, and give them a better, faster, more secure and safer browsing experience. But it’s not going to happen overnight.

It’s easy to assume that the slow upgraders might be ill-informed home users, but actually they’re mostly not. The slowest to upgrade are large corporate, Government departments and local councils. Why? Economics: plain and simple. Their Windows 2000 desktops work pretty well in most respects, and upgrading thousands of users is no cheap task. New browsers won’t run on old Windows, so lots of these companies don’t actually have a realistic choice. Yes, they will upgrade, but it could be a while. Perhaps when Windows 7 comes along – perhaps later.

As website designers, our role is not to dictate which browsers people use. People have the freedom of choice – and sometimes they don’t. They use the browser they have – and will upgrade when they can. They are our audience – we dance to their tune. If we don’t, we could lock out a quarter of our audience, which is hardly sensible. I don’t like it, but it’s the way it is – and for Web designers, it’s the way it’s always been. There has always been a ‘problematic’ browser in with the rest when testing, whether it’s Netscape 4, Internet Explorer 5 or Internet Explorer 6. At some point, the number of users does fall away enough to stop supporting them, but until it does, you have to do exactly that.

Just this week, we launched a new website, and although we do test in Internet Explorer 6 (and 7, and 8, and a whole load of other browsers) we’d missed a small display glitch. The client’s husband, who works at a large financial institution, spotted it, and flagged it. It was easy to fix, once we knew that he was using Internet Explorer 6 – but it shows how important it is to check, check and check in all mainstream browsers (including those you hate). Like him, many people sat inside large companies are still using Internet Explorer 6.

To make sure that your website reaches the maximum audience, it’s vital that your Web design company is supporting all mainstream browsers, not just the ones they fancy. Most Web designers would make sure that their sites work in Firefox, Safari and Opera, but Internet Explorer 6 still has a greater number of active users than any of these – so it’s insane not to support it.

Don’t take this testing for granted – make sure your Web designer is still testing for Internet Explorer 6 and, if you have the time, ask them to show you how they test to confirm that it is being done.

For the record, we test as standard in:

• Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8
• Firefox 2 and 3
• Opera 8 and 9
• Safari 3 and 4

We also test using Windows, Mac and Linux machines. We no longer support development for Internet Explorer 5 on either the Mac or the PC because there really are too few users now to make the additional testing burden worthwhile. We can, if we need to, test in most browser versions back to Internet Explorer 2 (I’m geeky enough to have virual machines for Windows 95 and upwards).

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