A flurry of IE6 related activity on the web this week coincided with a discussion we are having at The Guardian on the same subject. We have been talking about the relative benefits of keeping website performance in IE6 consistent with that of other browsers, and the disproportionate amount of work this requires on the parts of developers and the QA team. We’ve been trying to figure out better processes to reduce the number of styling bugs in IE6, while not compromising the user experience or the hard work put in by our design team.
It turns out people have surprisingly strong views on cross-browser consistency. For some, IE6 represents much more than just ‘a browser’. It also represents, variously: a large market share; an important group of corporate users; a user’s freedom to choose whichever device she wishes to browse the web. Once you start dropping a browser for technological reasons, the argument goes, you might as well arbitrarily drop support for anything which you consider below par – mobile browsers, text browsers, people with small monitors.
The opposing view says that IE6 is many years old and two versions out of date, a huge security risk and a drain on resources. We shouldn’t be pandering to slow or paranoid IT departments who refuse to upgrade their systems. Anyway no one chooses to use IE6, it is forced upon them by said IT departments.
I’m loath to branch the code to produce a separate version of the site for any reason, be it a device or a browser. But I also see the amount of pain IE6 causes developers, especially when they’re trying to do something fancy with JavaScript, and even more especially trying to do so without using a standard library which might easily provide you with cross-browser methods for doing stuff.
I support IE because I have to. But I do also believe strongly in wide accessibility, through as many devices as possible. We should assume nothing — nothing — about how our users access the web. But I don’t think this is the point here. The point here is adhering web standards, which apply to both code and content. Remember, the content itself — the information — usually isn’t broken. It’s what you’re trying to do with it that’s broken. The CSS and the JavaScript. Go back to Tim Berners-Lee’s 2002 document on universality and device independence for a lesson in what putting stuff on the web is all about. Work with the web, not against it. It’s really good at presenting and sharing text and pictures. But it’s not a magazine layout. Berners-Lee once said,
“Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”
We can infer from this that a site isn’t ‘best viewed in’ anything: it’s just ‘viewed’, however it might end up. So, yes, your site might look lovely, but if getting it there is so complex that it breaks browsers, or takes up 50% of your development time, then you’re plainly doing something wrong.
Try taking your page back to basics, get rid of the awful advertisement JavaScript and the three different kinds of page tracking, and start paying more than just lip-service to web standards and accessibility. That XHTML doctype declaration you’re using, trying adhering to it. There, it probably works a lot better now, yes?
But ultimately, and as usual, I think the whole issue comes down to a business decision: how much time/money are we spending on development versus how much money that development brings in. It’s a brave person who decides to cut off 25% of their users.
Some points that came up as part of our ongoing discussion:
- Should the design be 100% consistent across all browsers, or would our designers be happy to sacrifice certain style elements? We currently stop a code release if something looks bad in IE6, although we have already made one or two decisions to remove an element from IE6 in order to expedite a code release. In both cases we ran things past the Guardian’s Creative Editor, Mark Porter, before doing so.
- If you want to drop suport for IE6, you have to completely and utterly drop support for it. And in all likelihood never look at it again. Because the next time you do, it will be horrifically broken. Stopping development on that browser doesn’t just mean it won’t get cool new features. It still gets the features, but they won’t be tailored to it, and will break it. That smart Javascript widget you just wrote? That breaks the page in IE6. Some new element you put in with a fixed width and margins? That breaks the page in IE6. You have to cut the cord. Be strong, give it a firm handshake and say goodbye.
- Turns out Microsoft haven’t quite cut the cord yet, though. Microsoft support Windows XP Service Pack 3 as a current product (it shipped in April 2008), and will retire support for it 2 years after the next service pack is released, or at the end of the Windows XP product lifecycle, whichever comes first. IE6, which shipped as a component of XPSP3, continues to have Mainstream Support as part of that product:
- Our current browser usage figures look like this:
- IE 7: 35%
- IE 6: 25%
- Firefox 3: 25%
- Safari: 7%
- Firefox 2: 3%
- Google Chrome: 1.5%
- Opera: 0.5%
- We currently have a problem even testing in IE6, because the corporate build on the PCs we use doesn’t contain it, it has IE7 as standard. And you can’t run IE7 and IE6 concurrently. Ironically, our technical infrastructure is sufficiently advanced that we have difficulty supporting old technology.
That flurry of activity in full:
UpMyStreet has given me my first experience of working within a version control system for developing code, and it hasn’t been a happy one.
Some very exciting news – I have a new job! In a couple of weeks I start work with