When can you reasonably stop supporting IE6?

6:19p.m., Tue 8 Jul 2008

37 Signals' Basecamp will cease to support IE6 in August:

http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/07/basecamp-phasin.html

That's nice. It's reassuring when another key site phases out that shoddy piece of out-dated software.

But... an online application that's used (generally speaking) by web professionals - well, I'd expect that kind of site to be the first.

For a commercial website reliant on the outdated business model of generating revenue through advertising, it's gonna be years from now. Until the %%age of IE6 users drops below 5%% for a sustained period of time support won't be dropped and it shouldn't be either.

I once did some work for a company in the early noughties whose websites didn't work in IE on a Mac, in Firefox, Opera... in fact, they worked in IE5 and 6 on Windows and that was it.

"But only a minority of our users use these browsers, it doesn't make business-sense". (Side-rant: Your traffic figures say they're the minority? Well, no shit Sherlock. It's because your site doesn't work in those browsers. They visit the homepage they see it's broke. They harumph, go away and NEVER come back. Isn't your business-sense tingling? Cos my spidey-sense is giving me a splitting headache.)

What eventually swayed the powers that be was complaints. A combination of the increase in complaints from users and comments from people that they respected. Complaints that finally tweaked their 'business-sense'.

Dropping support for a userbase that still numbers 5%% of your audience would be just as bad, nay worse, than failing to support newer browsers six or seven years ago. New adopters will have been savvy to the whys and wherefores of sites that failed in their shiny new browsers. They mightn't have liked it, but they understood it. Users that are long-standing, loyal customers and then suddenly their favourite site doesn't work. They'll be pissed off and they'll complain and whine and bitch. They're also the users that are least likely to be able, or to want, to upgrade or switch browsers. Which means they'll whine and bitch that much harder. You can't blame them, it's not their fault.

In fact, thinking about it... 5%% may be high. Let's say you have 250,000 unique users per month. That's 12,500 affected... around 450 a day (more in the week) even if only 10%% complain that's till a lot of customer service resource, nerves of steel and very thick skin. OK, so I'll drop my threshold to 2%% which, at the current rate of decline, means years and years.

Luckily. The decline won't be linear. There's a whole host of other factors.

You might argue that the release of IE8 might herald the death knell of version 6. I think that's optimistic. IE8 will probably ship this year. But even if it's great and even if people like it and even if people talk about it glowingly and tell all their friends about it, even if it's a screaming success (that's a lot of ifs, who thinks this is going to happen? Anybody?)... well, I still think the take-up won't kill IE6. The people who upgrade will be those that have already upgraded to IE7.

My previous post talked about how workplace use is perpetuating IE6. What will it take to motivate business to upgrade? It might well take a new, screamingly successful, ridiculously easy to use and maintain, and probably free, operating system. One that saves money or makes money.

The (buzzword alert) "cloud" might hasten a sharp decline in the last of the last-generation browsers - online applications to replace the standard packages: Outlook, Office and so on... In fact, just one killer app that the modern office and home can't be without But either way, we still need some kind of revolution.