There will be bugs

On Tuesday I posted about some recent frustrations we have experienced with a few projects where IE6 support has been necessary. There are some interesting debates that have been running for some time now about 'supporting' IE6 and these have hotted up again with the release of IE8.

Hopefully the release of IE8 will in some way help speed the demise of IE6 but the truth is that we are still involved with building sites that receive enough traffic from IE6 users to not be in a position that these users can be ignored. Even with this site we are still seeing around 25% of IE users on IE6.

For this reason I thought it would be a good move to state what our current position is in regards to developing for IE6 and what we mean by 'support' for it.

It is actually quite simple. We believe that the current percentage of IE6 users can't be ignored. There are many developers taking the stance that 'support' for IE6 should be dropped to help encourage these users to upgrade. We are not so sure that this is the right way forward. Many IE6 users are probably using company machines that are administered by others who will have their own reasons for not upgrading - whether legitimate or lazy.

Since we care about usability, we have to cater for these IE6 users and on this basis our stance is to continue providing 'support' for their browser in such a way as to continue to make the site usable. We have worked hard over the years to keep sites looking as similar in IE6 as they do in the other browsers and as with our own site, we are now going to back off from putting this level of work into IE6 on our projects.

Our plan is to continue carrying out quality assurance checks in IE6 that are based on usability and not design compatibility. The level of design support for IE6 is likely to always vary from project to project but the graceful degradation approach seems the most obvious to continue with for now. Many future projects will likely suit serving up a stripped down stylesheet that keeps things working but offers a vastly simplified design but even this might not even be necessary.

Our own site is an example of this. With a few bugs aside the site continues to be readable and usable in IE6 and a little more time over the coming weeks will no doubt iron a few of these out 'gracefully' where we feel the need to do so.

Of course all of the above considers only design and CSS, support for Javascript in older browsers is another matter entirely that has to be considered on a project by project basis.

The bottom line for us is that ignoring IE6 is still not an option, as much as we might like to.