Earlier this week, Dave retweeted TechCrunch’s, “Whoa, People Really Don’t Like IE6.”

You might imagine that, as Web site designers and developers, we’re not big fans of the outdated eight-year-old browser that often causes heartburn during the final test and can add hours to a project.

So during our weekly Go9 Time meeting, Ami asked, “Will Go9Media be the first [development company] to drop IE6?”

After the initial, knee-jerk, “hell yeah!” response from the team, we had a lively debate.

At first, conversations definitely leaned toward a Draconian elimination of the ancient Microsoft browser from our repertoire, and there are good reasons to consider dumping IE6 altogether: Costs involved in ensuring sites render correctly are either absorbed by Go9Media or passed on to our customers. Traffic from the old browser dwindles every day; on our own site only about 5% of visitors come from IE6.

Not to mention the emotional and physical toll that comes from repeatedly beating your head against a wall.

However, a recent Digg survey shows that 70 percent of IE6 users do so at work, where they do not have control over which browser they use. Additionally, Rhodes pointed out that one of Go9Media’s own customers is a university which built its entire learning platform in IE6, and they can’t devote resources to updating it right now.

And that seems to be the crux of the issue — money. As one astute reader of the TechCrunch article commented, IT folks tend to appreciate new and improved technology; it’s more likely getting companies to devote the financial resources it would take to upgrade all the existing in-house programs built on IE6.

Ultimately, Go9Media is in business to serve its customers. We can’t tell our customers we simply no longer support what could be a potentially important browser for them.

“I think it’s a good conversation to have — to say, ‘Stop using IE6’ — but it’s not a good business decision for us,” Dave said.

So instead we have decided to take steps that will gently encourage adoption of more modern browsers. For example, we will begin monitoring traffic on sites we’ll be redeveloping, and encourage those clients to consider not optimizing for IE6 if overall it’s less than 10 percent.

Tracy has also agreed to pose the question, “Which browsers would you like your site to be optimized for?” in her new client media planner, which will give us the opportunity to educate the public even further.

So the answer to Ami’s question is not yet. But the movement is definitely afoot.

Tags: Austin, browser, design, IE6, IT, Microsoft, optimization, platform, technology, TX, website

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 11:39 am and is filed under Our Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.