"Look, there's no way that I can persuade my company to spend right now to upgrade their browsers. Can you still help me?"
The problem with Internet Explorer 6 is that it is a very old browser. When it was first released, it was cutting edge technology, but 11 years later, it is starting to show its age.
It seems somewhat strange at first sight to mention explicit support for a version of a web browser. The majority of your customers won’t care, or even know what browser they use to browse the Internet.
Some enterprises have written software explicitly designed for IE 6, that will break on more modern, and more powerful browsers. As a result, it isn’t always as simple as just saying that users of IE 6 can be ignored. These companies have spent millions on developing an application that will only work using IE6, and they have no interest in investing millions more just so that their employees can browse more modern websites in their lunch breaks. If it is using some of the security flaws that can be found in IE6 to write files it may not even be possible to simply port the project to a more modern browser!
When you are considering your project, you should also consider your market. Do you anticipate many people using your project from inside a large corporation? Do you need to have customers from any Government organisation?
One thing to beware of is that it is not necessarily the correct move to implement IE6 support just to try and attract the users of organisations that haven’t updated their internal systems yet. There has been a lot of progress made on features and on browser design in the last 11 years, and IE6 doesn’t implement a lot of features that can make some of the latest projects possible. It will also add a significant cost to developing the design for the application, as the design will have to be checked in IE6 after every alteration.
Pros:
- Supporting: If your client needs IE 6, you need to implement it. Even if he doesn't, the users sitting behind corporate firewalls will appreciate your devotion to their experience.
Cons:
- Costly: IE 6 support slows down development. It doesn't work on Windows Vista or Windows 7, requiring either an emulator or another computer to test on. In addition, there are some ways in the way that IE operates that are just plain bugs.
- Featureless: As mentioned above, IE 6 is now 11 years old. That means that any features released in the last 11 years, it just hasn't got! There are work arounds to some of these, but if you want to use any of the latest technologies, you don't want to be offering IE 6 support.
Did you know? On July 6, 2004, US-CERT released an exploit report for IE6 in which the last of seven workarounds was to use a different browser!
