Oh IE6, How I Hate Your Small Market Share
No matter how hard we try, us UX developers just can’t seem to get Internet Explorer 6 to die. The browser itself sits at a 5-8% market share on average, yet companies are still investing large sums of money to ensure that they aren’t leaving anyone behind.
For ecommerce sites, this is understandable. If you’re selling a product online, you’re probably not going to alienate that 8% of potential buyers. The rationale for supporting IE6 is more of an opportunity cost issue at that point.
The internet has become a great forum for airing your grievances against those that have wronged you. Especially when the wrong was committed online via your website. Your users will make it clear to you and the rest of the attentive public that your site sucks, if they visit your site in an outdated browser and cannot purchase your blue widgets.
Progressive enrichment
This is where progressive enrichment comes in. Progressive enrichment is the idea that you build websites in a manner which allows them to support the feature set of the browser that is being used.
In a Webkit based browser, you may have rounded corners, drop shadows or animations. In any flavor of Internet Explorer, you may have square corners with no drop shadows. The idea being that users who visit your site with Internet Explorer get to see the same content as everyone else, it’s just not as flashy.
Kill the IEs
Progressive enrichment is step 1. Step 2 is getting rid of IE6 and I would argue IE7 all together. None of this is going to happen unless we can get the IT departments of corporate America on board with us.
While the average number of 8% market share is small, the actual number of users shopping your wares is probably quite larger. The whole reason that we cannot move past IE6, is because corporate IT departments are either afraid to move past such a “secure” platform, or they are afraid that by moving forward they will see the threats to their networks and their budgets decrease.
These motivations keep workers (who like to shop online at work) surfing the internet with outdated technology. We will be getting IE9 soon, which means that we will be supporting four different versions of Internet Explorer.
No, seriously kill them
I’ve yet to work with a client who has asked me to support more than one or two versions of any other browser, yet always asks that support for all of the various Internet Explorers be included.
It’s time to kill off a couple of those versions. Until they are dead we should be spending our time being innovative for the browsers that will allow us to, and merely provide a functional experience for the ones that won’t.