Youtube and Digg to drop IE6 support, who's next?

At this point it is not necessary for me to tell you anything about Internet Explorer 6. If you are still using it you would not be reading this blog in the first place. And even if you were, you would find out the great deal of internet that you are missing. As you probably know IE6 does not support (or at least not out of the box) many CSS, javascript and multimedia features that are so widely spread in today's internet usage, not to mention its 142 security vulnerabilities, 22 of which are unpatched as of January 2009. But its market share ranges from 5% to 25% depending on which website you measure it, so it has been a real pain in the backside for every puny webmaster who is asked by his clients to add IE6 support in their websites.

Recently there has been a trend to bury IE6, led by many, many, many, many web developers who are sick of finding a workaround for every fancy feature that they want to add to their pages. But hey, nobody cares about developers!

Yeah nobody cares about developers, but companies care about their money, and they realized how much effort and money they have to spend on developing IE6 compliant applications. Many of them even have to create entirely different IE6 versions of their CSS stylesheets, JS libraries and images due to the differences between the assets needed to make a site run across the different browsers.

Youtube is the leading company in online video playback, and is daily watched by millions of people having reached its milestone of 100M US viewers in 2008. Anyone can watch videos in Youtube and registered members can upload an unlimited amount of videos which are immediately indexed by its powerful search engine. It is owned and powered by Google.

Digg is one of the biggest (about 3 million users strong) content-focused social networks, famous for its well known "Digg Effect", a consequence of driving insane amounts of web traffic towards smaller sites when posting links in the network.

Apple MobileMe is a service that allows Apple users to sync all their devices using one single application without wiring the devices together.

What do these three websites have in common? They all decided to stop supporting IE6.

Who else stopped supporting IE6?

There is no official list of websites known to have dropped IE6 support. Google already wrote in several occasions encouraging users to stop using IE6 in favour of Firefox or Chrome, also Microsoft, the browser's owner and developer often urges their users to upgrade to IE8. There are collaborative lists made by webmastwers who decided to end the support, such as IDroppedIE6.com. You can also find Facebook groups, Twitter, and forum campaigns and so on, but hey, we're not promoting hate here.

Is IE6 really so bad?

It is a bad browser for today's standards. When it was created there were not many devices or programs that could access the web, IE6 along with 5 held up to 95% of the market share in 2003, and most webmasters did not really care about the W3C HTML4 recommendation since nobody was thinking of the alternatives. IE6 was designed to work with the most common practises of web development in the late 90's and early 2000's. This lack of vision in the past, and the variety of browsers and internet devices widely adopted presently, led to the current situation with websites trying to be standard compliant but still topping 25% of traffic from IE6.

If you want to create a 100% IE6 compatible website today, you will end up losing many hours installing workarounds for features that it does not support, and chances are you will break any of the w3c recommendation rules. And if you are not so lucky to find the workarounds, your website will lack some features in IE6 that in the other browsers will work flawlessly.

Who uses IE6?

Users who browse internet on IE6 belong to any of the following groups:

• Companies/Organizations that have old versions of Windows on their machines, on which the newer browsers are not supported.
• Companies/Organizations that run Windows XP on their machines, but users don't have administrative permissions on their terminals to install new browsers.
• Novice users who were sold a PC with a pirated copy of Windows XP installed on it. Illegal WinXP copies have automatic updates disabled and those users may not know how to manually upgrade or install newer browsers.
• There are some users willingly browsing internet on IE6, but they are regarded as a minority.

Should I worry about them?

Some developers care about supporting IE6, but it is mostly the website owners and not the developers who ask for such feature. Any professional programmer can say that if your website is w3c compliant, it is not really your fault that it does not work with an eight-years-old browser.

My website is broken on IE6, what should I do?

Check your own statistics, if your traffic from IE6 is high enough to represent a threat, it would be worth to find the problems and workaround them. If your IE6 users are a minority you might want to put a warning to be displayed for IE6 users only. There are several pre-fabricated ones that you can easily implement.



Some useful links:

• Standalone IE6 Warning, published at Google Code, by the user: mihai.ile.
• Another standalone, but less intrusive message that is being used here at this blog.
• Shockingly Big IE6 Warning, a Wordpress plugin.
• IE6 Warning, Joomla extension.

Whatever option you use, try to follow these suggestions:

• Don't put a very intrusive message, some users are not able to upgrade and they will be annoyed to have a window popup on every screen.
• Don't mislead users, to keep a consistent user experience, encourage IE6 users to upgrade to newer versions of IE rather than showing biased messages in favour of FF or Chrome.