Don't Stop Supporting IE6

In fact, I believe we should support telnetters too. Hell, we should all have a help desk set up so that people that don't have a computer can call us up and interact with our web apps. Any good designer should be able to work within those constraints and still <i>kick ass</i>.

Cost: Extremely high<p>Benefit: Non-tech savy users can check out my tech business<p>Are IE6 users the kind of people that will buy your product, utilize your social media, read your content? If they haven't upgraded to something better yet and it's FREE to replace and has been for years, what are the odds that they will pay for your service.<p>Quality of eyeballs matters more than quantity of eyeballs, and I would say that the people running IE6 are rarely the target market for tech businesses.

The tone is overly-bombastic, but there's the seed of a good idea in here. Getting the a consistent look in FF3 and IE6 is Sisyphean; making a IE6-only layout much easier.<p>The author recommends dropping the whole "one app, one look" conceit and shuffling the dinosaurs to a dinosaur pen, with a simpler layout and the same content (you have been separating content and presentation, right?).

What a crock. Not being a dick to people let them sit in their stupid comfortable IE6 for the last 8 years blissfully unaware that they were holding back advancements that would make their lives better. If I try to run new software on Windows 95, it will slap me in the face and tell me to slag off. The same should hold true for the web.<p>You go ahead and spend time delivering content to IE6 Toby, but I'm going to hop on the bandwagon that was far too late in coming and continue to tell these people to slag off until they upgrade.

All IE6 users should be blocked until they upgrade from any and every site. Zero tolerance of terrible browsers.

I'm starting to sound like a broken record:<p>Serve your mobile version to IE6 users.

Cross-posted from my comments on the blog itself:<p>I think the reason for the recent high-profile assault is not zeal on the part of the people actively decrying IE6. They just realize that sometimes, to make change happen (especially change this “drastic”) is to make a lot of noise. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.<p>They want people to stop using it, instead of just refusing to design for it for 2 reasons (and maybe more):<p>1. As web designers/developers, we are passionate about people having a beautiful and pleasant web experience. If we just stop developing for IE6, everyone who hasn’t dropped it may have a lesser experience, which just wouldn’t do.<p>2. Many of them may be forced to support IE6 by their respective powers-that-be, so the only way they can stop actively supporting (designing for) it is by getting a significant amount of people to stop using it.<p>I agree with you in general. I am never a fan of over-zealousness and pushiness, but sometimes that’s the only way to get things done.

Again, what he's really suggesting is this: &#60;<a href="http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/universal_internet_explorer_6_css/&#62;" rel="nofollow">http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/universal_internet_ex...</a>. He's just chosen to introduce it with a poor first paragraph.

Can't someone perform an A/B test to see what IE6 users are like?<p>A quick peek on a webapplication ive got google analytics for shows that they spend 8 minutes per visit on the site but the average is 10 minutes.<p>A peek at another static site that mainly make money on adsense show that IE6 users click on less ads. However, going by this measure I shouldnt care about FF at all since eCPM is terrible there.

That's exactly what I do: IE6 must work, but I don't care how it looks. And it looks bad - mainly because of lack of support for transparent pngs (and I don't care to play with the workarounds).<p>But also things are not always in the right place, etc. But everything works.