Apparently one of the largest websites on the planet is no longer going to be supporting Internet Explorer 6.0. For some, this is sad news and for others this couldn’t make them happier.
You could probably argue both sides of the camp here, especially from our perspective, of why we should keep making our websites IE 6.0-compatible, but I’m now leaning more on the side of simply educating one’s visitors the benefits of IE 8.0+, FireFox, Safari, and Chrome.
We should definitely be considerate when educate them and not just block them from using your site (so don’t do something like this) and instead perhaps provide something like this great WordPress plugin, that gives them a little warning.
There are so many benefits to upgrading, and that’s the point that you want to communicate to your visitors (and possibly congregation…?). A better, faster, and more enjoyable experience!
Educate your visitors, but don’t close the door.
Graham Brenna says
Nice! I'm the IT department at my church and we're still running an older version of IE on our server. I don't like that but the people that upgrade our server haven't done anything about it yet. I'll email them again about it. Even though I'm the IT guy… I don't know much about our system…:(
I loved that CSS picture from April… good stuff!
Adam_S says
My wife's works (the 45 largest school district in the country) still requires IE 6 for internal use. I know it takes time and energy to manage an upgrade, but it is time. They are supposed to be doing a refresh on all of the teacher computers in the next week or so. So this is probably part of it. Although they have been told they will no longer be able to load software or drivers on their computers, even though the point of giving teachers laptops was to allow them to work at home.
human3rror says
hmm. moving on … UP!
joannamuses says
Or you could go one step further and suggest they not just update their IE but move to Firefox instead
human3rror says
yes, that is definitely a better solution.. get rid of IE entirely!
philldo says
It is definitely time to ditch IE6. I think things will change faster once more big sites like youtube make a push. I'm not sure that our IT department would warrant making a the switch if I plea that i won't be able to use youtube.com properly unless they loss IE 6. I'm at work right. Why would I be on youtube?
With the wonky ads for IE 8, it's only a matter of time before the whole world upgrades to IE 8. lol
stephenbateman says
I just read a CSS book from 2006 that was full of IE-6 fixes and bugs. Little did they guess that three years later, it would still be the same story.
human3rror says
sad story!
Chris Coppenbarger says
For our next version of our website, we have decided not to even test on IE6. I tried that with the last version and got a number of complaints. We shifted our focus now to who our target audience is: 18-25 year olds, not 64 year old alumni who think that the browser is the internet.
@gotdibs says
This is so on the money! IE is a pain for any web dev and/or coder. Having to scale code for such an outdated browser is an enormous waste of time. If there's one thing to re-post and loop to the common web consumer it would be this. Only problem might be third world…
human3rror says
that… is true. but even they can afford open source..!