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I am one of two front-end engineers at a major site with 10 million members. We're having this discussion internally. From our side we want to stop because 80%

by geuis 18y ago

I am one of two front-end engineers at a major site with 10 million members. We're having this discussion internally. From our side we want to stop because 80% of our time is actually spent on making things work for IE6. It's a huge number. 80% of my salary is being spent on less than 30% of our audience. 78% of our total traffic is IE, with 66% of that being ie7 and the remaining being 34% ie6. The biggest hurdle we face is that we aren't a small company. We can't make smart decisions like adding upgrade prompts because marketing would throw a fit. The approach right now we are taking is to get data. Microsoft ends support for IE6 in July 2010 when support for WinXP SP3 ends. After reading about the blogger who found only 2% of his ie6 visits were real, I am now looking into that for us. On our projects, I am keeping track of how much time is spent on supporting it versus ie7, ff, and safari. What it boils down to is that we will only be able to drop support when we can prove it costs us more than we make from ad clickthroughs from ie6 users.

josefresco 18y ago
What you you building that requires you spend 80% of your time fixing for IE6? I can't even imagine.
- geuis 18y ago
  First, 80% is an off the cuff comment/estimate. Obviously its not that high, but it is still very high. I had meant to say 'feels like 80%'. When you work for a large company and the major decisions on visual design are made by other people, you have little control over how it looks or behaves, and only the freedom to code. Unfortunately, this breeds an atmosphere where people with little concept of the difficulties of implementing cross-browser designs are the ones expecting and demanding that they work in IE6 and "it should look like the picture from the design team." So yes, a site or feature that takes me hours or a day to code up and be proper in FF, Safari, and IE7 usually adds up to 4x the same amount of time to make it work in IE6. Not always, but often enough that it has become an issue.

by geuis 18y ago

josefresco 18y ago

What you you building that requires you spend 80% of your time fixing for IE6? I can't even imagine.

geuis 18y ago
First, 80% is an off the cuff comment/estimate. Obviously its not that high, but it is still very high. I had meant to say 'feels like 80%'. When you work for a large company and the major decisions on visual design are made by other people, you have little control over how it looks or behaves, and only the freedom to code. Unfortunately, this breeds an atmosphere where people with little concept of the difficulties of implementing cross-browser designs are the ones expecting and demanding that they work in IE6 and "it should look like the picture from the design team." So yes, a site or feature that takes me hours or a day to code up and be proper in FF, Safari, and IE7 usually adds up to 4x the same amount of time to make it work in IE6. Not always, but often enough that it has become an issue.