Survey: Do you customers still use IE6? Can we drop support? (Post Here!)

7 posts by 5 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: August 18, 2009   (RSS)

By Dave - August 14, 2009

Hi Everyone,

There's a lot of talk about this on the net right now, with major sites like facebook, youtube, and digg starting to phase out support for IE6. Links:
http://mashable.com/2009/07/16/ie6-must-die/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-ie6-support-goodbye/

Do your customers still use IE6? If so:
a) Would they be willing to upgrade IE?
b) Do they have other browser available they could use?
c) Or are they in a locked down corporate environment where they can't choose or change their browser?

And if we phase it out, should we just have a warning on the login page that IE6 is unsupported and encourage upgrading?

Let me know your thoughts and feedback.
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

Re: [Dave] Survey: Do you customers still use IE6? Can we drop support? (Post Here!)

By Dave - August 14, 2009

Just one more comment on this. It's pretty standard to have lower browser requirements for a website itself than for the content management system behind it. Since only a very small group of people uses the CMS, it's easier for them update. Where as a much larger audience is going to be using the main website.

So you might still design your website to support IE6, but require a more modern browser to use the CMS that powers it.

There's an interesting article here about how most IE6 users can't upgrade because they're at work (and their PC is locked down): http://blog.digg.com/?p=878

And a neat site here that lets you display an IE6 looking "Upgrade" slide down at the top of your pages (try the demo): http://ie6update.com/
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

Re: [Dave] Survey: Do you customers still use IE6? Can we drop support? (Post Here!)

By InHouse - August 14, 2009

This is a great question and one which plagues us daily!

Our 4 our of 5 of our key accounts are still tied to IE6 (and Office 97 for that matter). This introduces many frustrations on both sides of the equation.

Your point Dave about the managers of a CMS having access to higher level resources than what the public site must support is well taken. This is mostly the case in our situation. However, I can easily imagine some of my clients being unable to upgrade their browsers due to the IT restrictions of their (mostly govn't) workplaces.

From my perspective, continuing to support IE6 is a necessary evil. [:/]

J.

Re: [Dave] Survey: Do you customers still use IE6? Can we drop support? (Post Here!)

By Kenny - August 14, 2009 - edited: August 14, 2009

Here's a sample of users on a Texas County Government Website that had about 23,000 visitors since August 1st:


7.0 11,484 55.76%
8.0 5,810 28.21%
6.0 3,294 15.99%
5.5 3 0.01%

FF 2,250 9.49%
Chrome 149 0.63%

But out of all the admins for the CMS, none of them use 6.0 or less.

It won't effect me or the hundreds of users we have on CMS. I'll tell them they have to upgrade or use a different browser. I know everyone else has their demons on this issue, but I say Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 was released on August 27, 2001 and it's time to upgrade now! We are approaching 8 years.... updating a browser to a new version once every 8 years is not too much to ask....

Also - As of January 10, 2009, Secunia reports 142 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6, 22 of which are unpatched, some of which are rated moderately critical in severity

Re: [sagentic] Survey: Do you customers still use IE6? Can we drop support? (Post Here!)

By Dave - August 14, 2009

I may have found a stop-gap measure. There's a free javascript library here that makes IE6 emulate a standards compliant browser (mostly):
http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
http://ie7-js.googlecode.com/svn/test/index.html

It basically "fixes" the page on page load. Looks good so far, I'll do some more tests and report back.

Also interested in what anyone else has to say about IE6! :)

Thanks!
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

Re: [Dave] Survey: Do you customers still use IE6? Can we drop support? (Post Here!)

By Deborah - August 15, 2009

I don't feel the need to support IE6 with CMS Builder. None of my current CMS Builder clients are using IE6 and I can indicate browser requirements before going into any new projects.

Deborah