While it's certainly a good general policy to not abandon significant segments of your user base, this is not a conflict of user ignorance vs developer laziness. The real question is whether preserving IE6-8 functionality is actually a good way to serve your customers. The resources you dedicate to retaining that 10% might be better used to improve your service for the other 90%. Focusing on modern browsers will also help to attract new customers who won't lock you deeper into these technical shackles. While this doesn't have to mean directly antagonizing people, it may involve making the site unusable and 'ruining' the experience for some.

As ever, it totally depends on the client base.

I'd suggest that most organisations that only had to support 10% IE6 use in the past have already actively made the decision not to support it any longer (I know that happened a couple of years ago for all the orgs I was working with).

For other companies, their customers are 90% on IE6. I know that's a hole of their own making, but in some cases it's a massive undertaking to dig out of. There's money to be made in supporting those guys :)

But still, making your app/service compatible with IE6 is a hassle for you and preventing you from doing a better job in other areas which harms your profits.

Perhaps we can take the hit for you. We could cause your customers to stop using IE[6-8] by specifically not fixing the sites to be backwards compatible. Your users will note that although your site still works in IE6, every other site won't. Then if we can drive down the 10% IE6 users of your site to 1%, then will you stop spending time making things compatible for it?

Sure, it'd be great if everyone used a modern browser. I don't think it's ever a good idea to intentionally punish users, though. I'm pretty sure anyone using IE6 (or 7 or 8) is very aware they are on a crap browser. Tons of sites have told them or just appeared broken. They likely aren't in a position to be able to do anything about it.

Have you run metrics to see what the ROI on your IE6 support is?

Do you know what percentage of your revenue these customers generate?

Maybe it's 10% of your user base, but 0% of your profits. Or 50%. You won't know until you run the numbers.

You might also like to run metrics as to how those same IE6 users evangelize your service. They might be really good at word of mouth, or at recommending other enterprise-level customers in via the golf course.

Or - more realistically - you could actually consider 10% of your customers a large, valuable chunk whatever the ROI and accommodate them.

Your choice.

Well, they're not valuable if the ROI is negative.

I think this is talking about immediate ROI, that is customers that actively purchase products, and indirect ROI, or customers that serve some other valuable purpose.

As most sites follow some kind of 80/20 rule, be careful to dismiss a small percentage of users if they fall in the critical 20%.

Then again, if you have data that shows IE6 users are just parasites, get rid of them.

Good advice! Unfortunately, our IE8 users are disportionately more valuable than average.

Just curious, any idea why you have so many users (10%) still on IE8 or under?

I just checked my usage, and I only have 8% using IE period -- all versions. Of those, only 8% are on IE8 or under -- which is only 0.6% of all users.

We have a network of B2B news and information sites for various industries. I think this is probably pretty standard for sites targeting enterprise users at non-IT companies.

It's actually kinda interesting to see the variations between industries like Healthcare vs Construction vs Utilities. If I get time maybe I'll write up a blog post.

Please do. It does sounds interesting.

We work in healthcare software, and IE7/IE8 support is mandatory, otherwise we'd be ignoring potential customers and losing current ones. Sure, they have iPads now, but healthcare IT moves really slow and we have to support that pace.

It's really not as simple as stated above. It's not up to us to kill it off.

I also work in healthcare software, and we've decided on skipping IE7 and IE8 software. It's all about what you can convince your client to let go of. It makes sense to run modern and less bug ridden browsers.

If they attempt to access using older browsers, we bring up an explanation page taking them to an ever green browser of their choice.

Lots of reasons for that - including your stuff doesn't work on IEx. Observers paradox.

We suspect that most of our winxp/IE<8 traffic comes from people stuck in corporations that haven't/can't upgrade with no privileges on their computer.

I agree with JoeAltmaier, but to add to that it depends on your product. eg. If you run a non-profit crm, you will have higher percentage of IE users. As opposed to a git hosting platform, you would have negligible use of IE. Put simply, it depends where on the tech scale your users are and products tend to appeal to some section of the scale.

That's exactly why any hypothetical boycott of IE[6-8] will have to be an industry-wide affair like the SOPA blackout. If everyone boycotts IE[6-8] at the same time, nobody will suffer any competitive disadvantage because of their participation in the boycott.

Well, for one thing, my competition isn't just other websites. And the risk isn't just that people will find a non-blacked out site.

Anyway, I'm against anything that's intentionally user-hostile as a matter of principle.

Unless you have an unlimited developer budget (and who does?) spending time and money on IE support is also user-hostile. It's just hostile toward a different set of users.

That money could be spent on improving the user experience for people with good browsers, developing new services, lowering prices, or any number of other things that would directly benefit the 90% of your users who have actually entered the 21st Century.

gp said "intentionally"

Deciding to allocate the resources to IE support happens by accident, you're saying?

part of the meaning of the word "intentionally" suggests "for that reason" not plainly "on purpose".

An IE6 boycott would be user-hostile in the same way that the SOPA blackout was user-hostile.

In the SOPA blackout, millions of innocent people were intentionally blocked from all those sites for 24 hours. Their convenience was sacrificed in order to apply pressure to people who actually were in a position to make a change.

The purpose of an IE6 boycott will be very similar. The purpose is not to hurt innocent workers who have no control over their computer, but to apply pressure to managers who actually are in a position to change things for the better. Even if the only change they make is to allow employees to install Chrome Frame.

The purpose of SOPA was to call attention to a bill that had enormous implications for the world at large.

The purpose of deliberately breaking IE6 support would be. . . what? To tell customers that we don't like old clunky technology? Seems just a teense less noble, don't you think? Especially in response to a situation that the free market can easily handle unmolested.

If you want to not have to worry about IE6 anymore, all you have to do is stop worrying about IE6. You don't need my help to do it. Though, if the only thing stopping you is fears about alienating customers I'd certainly be glad to help there - just send 'em my way. Can't say I even know how to support IE6 anymore, but if they've been able to cling to it this long I imagine there's a good chance their money's green enough to make it worth my time to re-learn.

I keep trying to imagine developers deliberately breaking their source code to fail in Bill Joy's vi to force users to upgrade to vim.

IE6 is certainly nowhere near as capable as modern browser but if you don't need fancy HTML and whamodyne JS then maybe it's not such a handicap after all?

I agree with you. If you build your site with Progressive Enhancement then there really should be very little you need to do. We never support IE6, but generally will support IE8 and occasionally depending on the client need to support IE7 too. Sometimes the css is screwed up with IE6 (if we even bother to test it) and it's just a case of a small tweek to a style but we wont go out of our way to fix it (or make any thorough testing)

It barely even supports CSS. IE6 was released more than 12 years ago and it was behind even then! I'm amazed people are still able to screw with their code enough to make anything work on it.

I agree that I can't drop support for IE 8 or risk losing customers. On the other hand, if facebook/youtube/wikipedia were to do it, and they were the bad guys instead of me, I'd be very happy.

It's not that easy. I worked supporting Virtual IE6 users and they use it in the context of a Java based internal web application or a web application which requires some specific ActiveX that only work with IE6. In general, to migrate these applications are a nightmare and the IE6 is only connected to an internal site, it never connects to internet.

These people might be using Microsoft software, but it would be a stretch to call them Microsoft customers. When was the last time they actually coughed up any cash? Besides, this is a bed Microsoft made, so they need to lie in it. The longer people stay with XP / IE 6-8, the worse the Internet gets for everyone. M$ is the only company that can do anything about it, and it's in their best interest to, so they just need to quit dilly-dallying and just do it already.

And is 10%+ of the Windows install base really XP???

No, I mean they are my customers! Right now, today, I have 10%+ users on IE6 through IE8. If I can afford to dedicate the resources to support them, I will. I don't believe in punishing users and I certainly don't believe in turning people away if I don't have to.

I'm not sure about XP specifically, but I get way more than 10% of my traffic from IE6-8. IE8 alone is over 10% on some of my business news sites. Don't forget IE8 shipped with Windows 7.

I'd be curious to know what that IE6 support involves nowadays.

There's a difference between having certain simpler layouts (although that probably affects conversion too), and IE6 actually messing up a purchase flow on an e-commerce site.

I actually dropped support for IE6 already, and IE7 is only "best effort" and is currently pretty wonky since our last redesign. We don't release updates that don't work in IE8, though. Too many users. Luckily for us it's mostly just display issues and I have no problem removing nonessential features or sections that are too hard to make work.

But if it's breaking the flow of your site, it might well be more trouble than it's worth.

It's sounds like you are doing what everyone else is. If the cost of support < cost of retaining those users than you fix it. You've realized IE6 is not worth it at this point and sounds like IE7 is getting to that point. For some people supporting anything <IE9 doesn't make any sense. I'm curious about IE8 users though. It seems that after IE7 it would be a much faster life cycle. Doesn't IE9 auto update? So our last hope is to get IE8 user to upgrade 1 time and then we're good?

I work with some enterprise customers and they seem to be mostly IE8 or IE9. We have one dreadful customer who still wants IE6 support but we've officially dropped IE6 & IE7 support. We still do direct hacks as part of consulting for that customer.

Sure, blindly supporting everything regardless of cost is just as foolish as intentionally breaking support to punish old IE users (IMHO).

A disproportionate number of our most important users are running IE8. I don't know if it's because they're still on XP (and thus can't upgrade past 8) or some other reason.

I'm not an expert, but I think it's so much that IE9 auto-updates as Win7+ does a much better job of pushing updates that include new browsers.

Unfortunately IE10 is the first browser to start auto updating silently by default.

I don't have numbers, but I'd be willing to guess that a fair number of IE6, 7, and 8 users were on corporate PCs which prohibited installations of newer versions of IE or other browsers. Microsoft can't do anything about those people! They have been try to end support for Windows XP and IE 6 for years, and newer versions of IE auto-update unless the user specifically tells the OS not to.

Actually Windows XP is 29% (http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/end-windows-xp-ha...) though it is steadily dropping.