What browser(s) do you draw the line at?

JamesBrentwood

Senior Member
I love web design, and I love all the new code coming out, HTML5 in genius, CSS3, mixed with some jQuery, and you can pull off some really amazing designs with minimal pictures, and no flash.
But where do you draw the line when it comes to compensating for incompatible browsers?
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Personally, I have almost completely given up on IE for all techie, arty websites. Things like doctors offices, I tend to play down everything in general so that I don't need to hack around the shortcomings of IE as much.
In all honesty, I don't even keep up with IE anymore, I have no clue what it supports, or what the current version is. I just expect it to be way behind.

I also haven't designed for mobile versions of websites. But I will be changing that with my next job (if they are willing to pay extra for that luxury). Mobile versions are really becoming more and more necessary imo. Good thing about smart phones is they are usually up to date on web standards.
 
Depends on the client, the project and its target audience, but generally, ie is widely used and cannot be ignored.

I still to do plenty of work that requires ie6 compatibility and some recent work was unbelievably 99% ie6 due to being internal corporate projects. In reality this is negligent, a waste of money and something that is partly a result of choosing to get locked into the Windows platform.

This is an absolute pain in the ass and the problem continues to get worse: while the rest of the world moves on and browser capabilities improve and become more consistent, designers quite rightly expect to leverage this with ever increasing functionality, finesse, detailing and interactivity. Unfortunately, forcing all this upon ie6 creates an ever increasing catalog of problems. Getting people to understand this is not easy. I offer a 'no-ie6 discount' on my dev work and this figure is increasing.

What would help is for ie6-heavy sites to be designed in an 'ie6-friendly' way, but very few designers understand this.
 
guru24 said:
.... What would help is for ie6-heavy sites to be designed in an 'ie6-friendly' way, but very few designers understand this.

I think this is a very good point.
 
guru24 said:
I offer a 'no-ie6 discount' on my dev work and this figure is increasing.
Seems like that's a good way of going about it.
I also agree with designing in an ie friendly way when you have a site that you know would probably be viewed by a lot of ie users. You really have to dumb things down, and change the way you think when you have to take it into account.

Looking at the stats on my most popular personal sites, I see a decreasing number of ie users, and that makes me :D
I think google is doing a great job of getting people out of ie jail by advertising chrome when you go to google.

So you design all the way down to ie6 in some cases? I just looked it up and they are at 9 now.
I have a wedding site coming up, and will need to research what to look out for in the later versions.
 
JamesBrentwood said:
I think google is doing a great job of getting people out of ie jail by advertising chrome when you go to google.

So you design all the way down to ie6 in some cases? I just looked it up and they are at 9 now.
I have a wedding site coming up, and will need to research what to look out for in the later versions.

Certainly in the UK, we still run into heavy ie6 requirements with corporate projects. Outside that bubble of lunacy, the numbers are low. Depends on the project.

There are many degrees of ie6 compatibility and usually it's up to the client to decide how much they want to spend on it. I usually aim for graceful degradation: "works fully in ie6 but may not look 100% as intended'.

Always code correctly for modern standards compliant browsers with progressive enhancement to safely make use of the more advanced browser features, so things like rounded corners don't get bodged with corner graphics. ie6 (7 and 8) gets fixed with conditional comments and some JS. ie9 is not great but it doesn't cause many problems.

We still get problems when the design is too elaborate for ie6 and standard CSS/JS fix methods don't work. Some ie6 bugs are random and obscure - these can be very time consuming to sort out and often you just can't justify the time/expense.

Chrome: good. Internet Explorer: bad, super bad.
 
Surely if you're having to work extra hours to make sure that their shiny new product will work with ancient, outdated technology your justification for the time/expense is just that?

Non IT people might assume there is no reason to upgrade their software, or their managers not deem it worthy of a larger section of their budget but when they're given a larger than expected bill because they've given you no option but to cater for IE6 and its many issues, perhaps the next time software/it systems is mentioned they will be more likely to utilise the appropriate resources to upgrade their software to something developed in the last decade.
 
Squiddy said:
Surely if you're having to work extra hours to make sure that their shiny new product will work with ancient, outdated technology your justification for the time/expense is just that?

Non IT people might assume there is no reason to upgrade their software, or their managers not deem it worthy of a larger section of their budget but when they're given a larger than expected bill because they've given you no option but to cater for IE6 and its many issues, perhaps the next time software/it systems is mentioned they will be more likely to utilise the appropriate resources to upgrade their software to something developed in the last decade.

The ie6 cost issue is real and justified and it's sensible to make that cost known to clients and give them the option to avoid it.

There are many reasons why ie6 lingers so long and one of those is that developers and agencies continue to absorb the problems - and often the cost - thus insulating people from the true implications of its existence. If the people who are forced to use ie6 were more aware of what they have been given to work with and all the bad that goes with it, they might start asking questions.
 
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