Ethical Dilemma: Should I still cater for IE6 as a web-developer [duplicate]

Answer 1

Depends on your user base and would need to be agreed with your client. For an intranet type application you may be able to avoid it. For public applications - government, banking websites, anything the public may rely on, you need to consider it still.

For more luxury type sites, e.g. 'brochure-ware' for a small business, you may be able to take a call on this, but again depends on your client's requirements - do they want to potentially turn away some business? If you can make it fail gracefully (i.e. still looks ok in IE6, but with less bells and whistles), then you have more chance of selling this.

Answer 2

I agree, making web sites display correctly in IE6 is tiresome. Being a web developer for a multinational pharmaceutical company I would know, they are still required to use IE6.

But there's another point to this. If we, the web developers as a group, continous to cater for IE6 then the large organizations have no reason to upgrade. Are we then responsible for people using IE6?

At our firm we have decided not to support IE6 in the administration part of our CMS, but we do cater for IE6 to the public eye.

The client mentioned earlier runs an old version of our CMS and is so stuck there although we and the administrators are willing to upgrade. In other words: Stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Answer 3

We are software developers. We make tools to make life easier for people ("users").

If a user of your software is using IE6, and you refuse to offer that user support until he/she upgrades to a newer web browser, are you making life easier or harder for them?

I'm actually not asking this question rhetorically, believe it or not. It may be that for you to support an older browser takes away too much of your time, keeping you from developing features that would be of greater benefit to the user.

My point is that you need to ask yourself what is best for the user, not whether catering to someone who's using an old version of a piece of software (who isn't?) is somehow beneath you.

Answer 4

I would definately suggest customer to upgrade with following points.

Technically no updates are provided by Microsoft for IE6, if they do not upgrade their browser, they should be made aware of all security issues they have left open by not upgrading, such mild threats do work and its right as well. Plus you can certainly recommend firefox, as Microsoft never completely implemented html standard and in large organizations, standard, compliance and security these are always considered as big things and you can certainly point towards them and get your update done.

Answer 5

No.

I have a client that requires for his pages to work in Netscape Navigator because he uses it.

That doesn't mean that I should prepare all my pages for last historical version Netscape Navigator.

Answer 6

One point con-support of IE6 is that Microsoft no longer offer support for it, and it is considered a defunct browser, so why should I waste my time catering for it.

Because it's not Microsoft you're catering for, or people who consider it a defunct browser, it's people using the browser, aka your customers. By all means, don't take on customers who have a requirement that you support IE6 with websites you produce, that is your chocie. But if you're getting paid for it, I'd hardly call it "wasting my time" =)