IE6 and IE7 do we need to worry?

Jazajay

Active Member
Right I've just reinstalled windows and 1 of the updates I've noticed was IE8 as an important update not an optional 1. So if Microsoft is pushing it as an automatic update and any1 with automatic updates turned on, which has got to be like 90%, will get it automatically is then any reason why we should worry about IE6 and IE7 anymore?

Personally I think this is 1 of the best things to hit the web design industry TBH, and brave of them, if not a year or 2 late at least.

But technically that means more IE users will be upgraded to the latest version over any other browser makers surely, as other browser makers cant force an upgrade via windows updates, even though it would be great if they could if impossible.

Thoughts? :)
 
It would be (very) nice to drop ie6 support but in the real world not so easy ie6 still has a 10% market share that means that if you build a site 1 in 10 people wont get a good browsing experience. A lot of corporate environments still have ie6.

For more stats its worth keeping an eye on - Browser Statistics
 
Disagree with those stats. Maybe thats there stats and alot of web designers are using Firefox.

But for a site like Flexifoil Kites, Power Kites, Traction Kites, Kitesurfing Kites - Leading Manufacturer Kites, Kite Landboard, Kite Buggy

Here are stats

1.Internet Explorer 49.45%
2.Firefox 26.81%
3. Safari 17.17%
4.Chrome 4.29%
5.Opera 1.53%

Internet Explorer breakdown
1. 7.0 43.55%
2. 8.0 42.43%
3. 6.0 13.98%

EDIT - So looking that for last month, I would say getting rid of ie7 & 6 compatibility is still a long way off!
 
If you read further down on w3cschools it says -

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.
 
rrrr ok! Didnt read down further just looked at stats. Hopefully the stats above will help for a general site with mixed users.
 
it would be nice just so I can use png24 natively, rather than needing a work around or using gif/png8 for ie6 :(
 
Yeah but if they are pushing it via a windows update and it's 1 of the 1's you don't have to pick, and pretty much every1 has windows update turned on why not?

Because surely windows will be updating and overriding IE6 and IE7 as soon as it's updated with the latest window updates surely?
 
it's businesses which are the slow ones to update, home users are probably 90% on ie8, but the big businesses are always slow to react, if they updated everything then ie6 should have disappeared along time ago
 
Yeah but surely businesses should have automatic update on, otherwise they are leaving themselves well open to security problems and if they have 6 and 7 will be updated to 8 as a result.

Bare in mind this update is given the same priority as windows security updates.
 
Big companies are usually behind massive firewalls and have internal intranet type servers meaning they've taken 'security' into their own hands. Then you have the 'tech support' staff which are reluctant to touch/update anything that's working as its hard work (not saying all are like this before I get shouted at).

In an ideal world it would be that simple but this is 'big' business not the little ones and they often like to think they know what's best for their staff. The amount of times I've seen a member of staff asking how to install firefox (or even ie8) on to their work computer is ridiculously high.
 
Thats true I didn't think of it in it that sense.
But youtube now has a message up for IE6 users saying they will soon be dropping support for IE6, just need more big sites to do that.
 
yeah it would be nice but the ironic/unfortunate thing is that most of the big companies that still use ie6 probably block youtube anyways so it makes no difference, now if google's search page was done like that then we might see a huge shift away from it.
 
It would seem that it depends on the site as to whether or not ie6 support is so hugely necessary, something like overclockers I imagine would have very few ie6 visitors, while something like a finance website might have alot more (due to alot of businesses not yet updating).

However IE8 is really being pushed upon people (good thing). Microsoft was offering an incentive to feed 2 homeless people for every upgrade from ie6 to ie8, and feed 1 person for every other ie7 -> ie8 upgrade.

And they keep threatening to get rid of support for ie6... To be honest it is 8 years old....
 
Some business' wont update to new browsers for various reasons. I like the Paul Boag, progressive enhancement approach to development.
 
There are always reasons but to name a few... The company might have compatibility issues within company web applications. Or they have out of date hardware (sounds stupid but its a bigger problem than you would think). But the biggest one would be the amount of money it would cost - if you take a massive company like MARSH for example the amount of time its going to take to update and/or upgrade (hardware wise) those computers will make it too expensive.

But the reasons aren't really important, companies are still using IE6 & 7 and you should make your content viewable to them. A way around it would be to monitor your sites traffic for browser versions and see how many IE6 + 7 users are visiting your site and make a decision from there.
 
I just check the referrer logs on my latest clients site and there is 1 page hit from from Internet Explorer 4, there is really no helping some ppl is there!!! :eek:
 
I know a company that has 50+ employees. All frun IE6 as the order programs for printing out invoices in batch, will not work properly with IE7 or IE8 as in margins and such. As it exports pages as web pages it means every machine requires the app to be custom ported. So as such, the changes are not always the same for each machine, therefore are staying IE6 for the foresable future.
 
lets be honest here, most the people using ie6 see no reason to update - if they knew why they should, they would already. So unless theyre literally forced to update it (which theyre not, quite...) they'll still continue to use it.
 
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