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No, I mean they are my customers! Right now, today, I have 10%+ users on IE6 through IE8. If I can afford to dedicate the resources to support them, I will. I d

by eli 13y ago

No, I mean they are my customers! Right now, today, I have 10%+ users on IE6 through IE8. If I can afford to dedicate the resources to support them, I will. I don't believe in punishing users and I certainly don't believe in turning people away if I don't have to. I'm not sure about XP specifically, but I get way more than 10% of my traffic from IE6-8. IE8 alone is over 10% on some of my business news sites. Don't forget IE8 shipped with Windows 7.

atonse 13y ago
I'd be curious to know what that IE6 support involves nowadays. There's a difference between having certain simpler layouts (although that probably affects conversion too), and IE6 actually messing up a purchase flow on an e-commerce site.
- eli 13y ago
  I actually dropped support for IE6 already, and IE7 is only "best effort" and is currently pretty wonky since our last redesign. We don't release updates that don't work in IE8, though. Too many users. Luckily for us it's mostly just display issues and I have no problem removing nonessential features or sections that are too hard to make work. But if it's breaking the flow of your site, it might well be more trouble than it's worth.
  - johnward 13y ago
    It's sounds like you are doing what everyone else is. If the cost of support < cost of retaining those users than you fix it. You've realized IE6 is not worth it at this point and sounds like IE7 is getting to that point. For some people supporting anything <IE9 doesn't make any sense. I'm curious about IE8 users though. It seems that after IE7 it would be a much faster life cycle. Doesn't IE9 auto update? So our last hope is to get IE8 user to upgrade 1 time and then we're good? I work with some enterprise customers and they seem to be mostly IE8 or IE9. We have one dreadful customer who still wants IE6 support but we've officially dropped IE6 & IE7 support. We still do direct hacks as part of consulting for that customer.
    - eli 13y ago
      Sure, blindly supporting everything regardless of cost is just as foolish as intentionally breaking support to punish old IE users (IMHO). A disproportionate number of our most important users are running IE8. I don't know if it's because they're still on XP (and thus can't upgrade past 8) or some other reason. I'm not an expert, but I think it's so much that IE9 auto-updates as Win7+ does a much better job of pushing updates that include new browsers.
    - cozuya 13y ago
      Unfortunately IE10 is the first browser to start auto updating silently by default.

by eli 13y ago

atonse 13y ago

I'd be curious to know what that IE6 support involves nowadays. There's a difference between having certain simpler layouts (although that probably affects conversion too), and IE6 actually messing up a purchase flow on an e-commerce site.

eli 13y ago
I actually dropped support for IE6 already, and IE7 is only "best effort" and is currently pretty wonky since our last redesign. We don't release updates that don't work in IE8, though. Too many users. Luckily for us it's mostly just display issues and I have no problem removing nonessential features or sections that are too hard to make work. But if it's breaking the flow of your site, it might well be more trouble than it's worth.
- johnward 13y ago
  It's sounds like you are doing what everyone else is. If the cost of support < cost of retaining those users than you fix it. You've realized IE6 is not worth it at this point and sounds like IE7 is getting to that point. For some people supporting anything <IE9 doesn't make any sense. I'm curious about IE8 users though. It seems that after IE7 it would be a much faster life cycle. Doesn't IE9 auto update? So our last hope is to get IE8 user to upgrade 1 time and then we're good? I work with some enterprise customers and they seem to be mostly IE8 or IE9. We have one dreadful customer who still wants IE6 support but we've officially dropped IE6 & IE7 support. We still do direct hacks as part of consulting for that customer.
  - eli 13y ago
    Sure, blindly supporting everything regardless of cost is just as foolish as intentionally breaking support to punish old IE users (IMHO). A disproportionate number of our most important users are running IE8. I don't know if it's because they're still on XP (and thus can't upgrade past 8) or some other reason. I'm not an expert, but I think it's so much that IE9 auto-updates as Win7+ does a much better job of pushing updates that include new browsers.
  - cozuya 13y ago
    Unfortunately IE10 is the first browser to start auto updating silently by default.