Has developing for IE6 become a sign of quality?
Yesterday it occured to me, that we – by we I mean anybody who develops anything for browsers on the internet – are too nice when it comes to IE6. I know that some of you out there will laugh at that statement, but just breathe in deeply and give this a thought: Can you honestly say that you have never bent over backwards, adding hacks and seperate stylesheets in order to make something look or function the same in IE6 as it does in the modern browsers?
Anyway, to get to my point I have to mention peoples behaviour these days. More or less all of us own and use a mobile phone, and we use those phones to browse the internet more and more.
Now take another deep breath and think about the following: Is there anyone out there who expects to be able to browse the net, see beautiful sites, and have all the functionality these sites can offer, from a Mobile phone that is 8 years old? We all know that we need a modern mobile phone like an iPhone or a phone that uses Android, or a similar OS to be able to get all the wonder. Anyone who uses an older device will know, and never expect to be able to have the same functionality when browsing the net as users of the aforementioned products.
Then why are we expecting all that wonder from inside IE6? And why are developers still, to this day, going out of their way to make sure their products work and look fine in IE6?
As for the developers I think I may have at least a partial answer: if we see a modern internet site with lots of beautiful functionality and lots of little widgets that all work in IE6, we think that a huge amount of work has gone into making that site. If our sites work in IE6 we can claim the following (which in itself feels rewarding): “works in IE6 and above”. If that is the case, then developing for IE6 has become a sign of quality. We see the “works in IE6″ as a quality stamp. We check the other developers sites and go: “It may be beautiful, but it doesen’t work in IE6!” and see that as a sign of lazyness or worse.
Honestly! How can developing for an old, and in many ways obsolete browser be seen as a sign of quality? I don’t think the majority of IE6 users expect the sites they visit using IE6 to have the same functionality as they would have if wieved with a modern browser, just like the users of old Mobile Phones don’t expect to be getting the same functionality as the iPhone users have.
So is it us, the developers, that keeps the much hated and scorned browser alive? The above reasoning points to that statement as being a, if not whole, then at least partial truth.
If you are using IE6 go here or here to get a modern browser
I don’t view it so much as a sign of quality, so much as a sign of “it works in every browser people STILL use”. I wish that IE6 wasn’t as popular as it is, or as common as it is, but it’s still around.
Pay a visit to colleges over here, their intranet relies upon IE6 to work, so they can’t upgrade. The same is, lamentably, true in a lot of corporate places too. Heck, I even know of people that don’t want to upgrade past IE6 because they don’t understand tabbed browsing. And they still expected the same functionality in their browsers that I was getting in Firefox.
Yes, sometimes I do end up with IE6 specific stylesheets, but the same is true with IE7. It’s the way things are, and probably the way things will be until such times as Internet Explorer is either gone, or works in a similar fashion to Firefox, Chrome and every other Standards Compliant browser out there.
So whilst I acknowledge that IE6 is there, and is a royal pain in my butt, and I work to make things look pretty in the archaic browser, I also don’t go above and beyond to do so. What a final site looks like in IE6 is highly unlikely to be what the site looks like in a more modern browser. If it does, then sweet. But I’m content so long as nothing breaks horrifically.