stevenclark.com.au

Who would have thought I’d wind up a defender of support for Internet Explorer 6? But there you go, as the last few years have progressed my realisation has been that the high usage of this 7 year old browser is simply a part and parcel of being a web developer. I can attempt to educate users, I can provide links to better browsers – but it’s the world at large who don’t give a rat’s arse about web development who get to make that call. They choose not to install a new browser, or not to use the new browser if it’s installed.

Reading an article by Dmitry on Usability Post titled Drop IE6 Support – Give People a Reason to Upgrade I noted a few holes that need to be addressed. It seems a growing wave of web developers, and more worrying for the fact that Dmitry’s blog is focused on usability, are advocating that this is a user’s problem. No, Internet Explorer 6 is a developer’s problem – it always will be.

How much less usable is your website if someone arrives with a browser you choose not to support? How much harder is your information to access if they first have to download another browser? And, is that any different from the user’s perspective to demanding they install Flash or Silverlight or have the latest version of JavaScript? If I go to the council site to find out the next garbage removal day – where does this extra noise for updating a browser fit in? It doesn’t. At that point we’re bad usability people, bad developers. At that point we’re pushing our issues back at the user and demanding they deal with it.

A recent article here titled Why Outcasting IE6 is Worst Practice discussies the 37signals notification that their Basecamp application will cease to support IE6 from October 1st, 2008. And why, after late October I’ll be dropping Basecamp and not recommending them on. It’s not good for my business to not support my clients and stakeholders.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a bleeding heart for Microsoft browsers and I’ve suffered at the hands of buggy box models for years. But, at the end of the day, the websites I’m involved in are hopefully concerned with user experience. The bottom line is if I can make a website at least usable in Internet Explorer 6, that’s quality software. Making it unusable in Internet Explorer 6 is about making bad software.

High moral ground and a catch-cry of “Down with the King” does not a good revolution make. Good design abstracts the problem from the user, rather than pushing it at them with demands of an upgrade. Does that make any sense?

I just can’t for the life of me see how such a request or intrusion benefits the usability for the site visitor. If people can’t use your site they just go elsewhere.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 9:35 am and is filed under accessibility, usability, web standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.