Dropping Support for Internet Explorer 6

2:37p.m., Tue 11 Oct 2011

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 has long been the bane of every front-end developer's life. It's a 10-year old browser - in software years, it's a pensioner, a stubborn old man who refuses to die. But, for the last 5 years or so it still commanded enough market share to demand that we continue to support it.

Newer browsers have lots of bells and whistles, yet IE6 is a generation behind. Here's a quick list of techniques that i commonly use but have to work around IE6 shortcomings.

• 24-bit PNG transparency
• CSS3 border-radius property
• CSS2 min-height property
• rgba background colours

In addition to that I find IE6 has lots of workarounds for it's inability to combine relative,positioning, absolute positioning and floats - then there's those elements that have weird phantom padding that just won't be over-ridden, guillotine bugfixes, double margin bugfixes, duplicate character bugfixes and so on....

I gave a presentation to my team earlier this year that included the following figures:

Internet Explorer Market Share: 3.6%
Development time devoted to IE6: 85%

These figures are made up - exaggerated for comic effect - but they make the point. Certainly we get A LOT of IE6-specfic bug reports - way more than any other browser.

But today.... the happy day arrived! Today the development team at Global Radio got agreement from the business to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6.

The Demise of Internet Explorer, 2011-2011

We took this decision after presenting browser share statistics for the last 12 months during which time browser share has dropped from 4% to around 1%.

We’re still seeing the higher figures on weekdays, which has been the trend for many years, but even at these peaks rarely peep over 1.5% browser share.

This is daily %age of visitors to CapitalFM.com over this summer. Looking around the other large sites that we have browser share is generally...

It's interesting that Big Top 40 is lower – this is a site for a networked radio show that is broadcast between 4pm and 7pm on a Sunday - it has traffic spikes over the weekend, so that makes perfect sense :)

Here's the trend of weekly share over the last 12 months for the pillar brands: Capital, Heart and Classic.

CapitalFM.com - Weekly IE6 Share

Heart.co.uk - Weekly IE6 Share

ClassicFM.co.uk

What 'Dropping Support' for IE6 Actually Means

We could just cut the cord - remove all IE6 hacks, stop testing in IE6 and cease support. But what would happen then? Well, in all likelihood, our website wouldn't just look a bit broken in IE6, it would probably crash the browser. That's not a reflection on our code, it's a reflection on IE6's plucky attempts to render pages but ultimately choke and die on code.

So, for IE6, we'll be witholding much of the CSS and JavaScript and just rendering pain old HTML. Well, fairly plain, we;l still have the brand represented in some way - the logo will be there and some colours, background colors and link colours will be reflective of the brand. A tiny subset of the javascript will still be served to IE6 - some simple scripts that open pop-up windows, tracking code and advertisement code.

Luckily we've long held the philosophy that everything should work without requiring javascript, so everything should work, even if the user experience isn't optimal - but hey! you're crappy browser isn;t crashing so this ios probably a better experience than before!

At this point you JavaScript includes look something like:

<!--[if !IE]><!-->
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/heart-min.js"></script>
<!--<![endif]-->
<!--[if gt IE 6]>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/heart-min.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

In essence, IE6 has just become a C-grade browser in the eyes of Yahoo's Graded Browser Policy:

C-grade is the base level of support, providing core content and functionality. It is sometimes called core support. Delivered via nothing more than semantic HTML, the content and experience is highly accessible, unenhanced by decoration or advanced functionality, and forward and backward compatible. Layers of style and behavior are omitted.