Just hope your competitors are as picky about their customers as you...
Benefit: Non-tech savy users can check out my tech business
Are IE6 users the kind of people that will buy your product, utilize your social media, read your content? If they haven't upgraded to something better yet and it's FREE to replace and has been for years, what are the odds that they will pay for your service.
Quality of eyeballs matters more than quantity of eyeballs, and I would say that the people running IE6 are rarely the target market for tech businesses.
Seeing as the majority of IE6 users are in the enterprise market... I'd say the odds are pretty good.
Anything more restrictive than that is not about income, as you suggest - it's about dogma.
I wouldn't push for banning IE6 if you are selling a non-tech product, but if you are a tech company and have a feature IE6 holds you back from implementing or are losing time to supporting it, dump it.
The author recommends dropping the whole "one app, one look" conceit and shuffling the dinosaurs to a dinosaur pen, with a simpler layout and the same content (you have been separating content and presentation, right?).
I've been in this game a long, long time and I saw (and, admittedly, took part in) the "insult and block" approach with Netscape 4. Looking back, it was immature, cocky and lazy. I hate seeing people repeat the same childish mistakes. Instead, we can build an economic model to decide how to classify each user agent for each property we control and act accordingly. It's not emotional or dogmatic - just practical.
To paraphrase a reply to a comment on my site:
I think my approach helps bring innovation while continuing to support the people stuck on less modern user agents.
Reclassifying IE6 into the category of feed readers, screen readers, and printers is a perfectly viable solution.
Oppose that to the childish antics behind blocking content based on user agent.
In each case, you get to provide interesting experience design for modern user agents, but only by reclassifying IE6 for content support do you also retain (some portion of) the IE6 audience.
When people say "not supporting IE6" I think they mean no longer doing browser specific bug fixing - that's what I mean. Provided the majority of textual content is viewable I consider IE6 done (ditto links2 my only currently tested text browser). If text is not viewable (as in an MS site I visited recently with IE6!) then the client has to pay a little extra if they want to up the support.
Graceful degradation is surely the lowest level of support any designer will accept, no?
So I'm targeting XHTML1-trans and CSS2.1 with enhancements for JavaScript and CSS3 capabilities.
You go ahead and spend time delivering content to IE6 Toby, but I'm going to hop on the bandwagon that was far too late in coming and continue to tell these people to slag off until they upgrade.
As is fairly normal people didn't switch to another browser because they were happy with what they had. They just haven't updated their version in 3 years, which is pretty normal with other types of software.
Serve your mobile version to IE6 users.
I think the reason for the recent high-profile assault is not zeal on the part of the people actively decrying IE6. They just realize that sometimes, to make change happen (especially change this “drastic”) is to make a lot of noise. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
They want people to stop using it, instead of just refusing to design for it for 2 reasons (and maybe more):
1. As web designers/developers, we are passionate about people having a beautiful and pleasant web experience. If we just stop developing for IE6, everyone who hasn’t dropped it may have a lesser experience, which just wouldn’t do.
2. Many of them may be forced to support IE6 by their respective powers-that-be, so the only way they can stop actively supporting (designing for) it is by getting a significant amount of people to stop using it.
I agree with you in general. I am never a fan of over-zealousness and pushiness, but sometimes that’s the only way to get things done.
A quick peek on a webapplication ive got google analytics for shows that they spend 8 minutes per visit on the site but the average is 10 minutes.
A peek at another static site that mainly make money on adsense show that IE6 users click on less ads. However, going by this measure I shouldnt care about FF at all since eCPM is terrible there.
But also things are not always in the right place, etc. But everything works.
