Oct
1
2008
It's hard to believe that I wrote this more than three years ago:
What I find especially frustrating, though, is how Microsoft forces me to spend so much time pampering their software. Yes, I'm talking about Internet Explorer, the iconoclastic web browser that refuses to acknowledge web standards.
How much online productivity is lost trying to get websites to look and function properly on Internet Explorer?
That would be an interesting question to explore. Talk to just about any web designer, and they will tell you that, for every 100 hours they spend on design, 50-60 hours are dedicated to actual design, and the rest is devoted to creating xhtml and CSS hacks to get it to work on Internet Explorer.
This is just as true today.
It's getting to the point where we're thinking of adding IE6 compatibility as a separate line item on our proposals and agreements. After all, when you're spending 35-50% of your theming time just trying to get a cool new design to work on one rather archaic browser, it's no small matter.
It's a ≈40% tax on web theming.
How can we get out of this? Thanks to Microsoft market share and IT departments' resistance to upgrading, I fear we're not going to be able to say a final good-bye to IE6 anytime soon.
Sophia Locero points to the IE Death March and several other like minded efforts to build a collective movement to simply drop IE6 support, and asks:
So many parties are restless about the state of web browsing, and rather than wait for Microsoft to get its act together, they take it upon themselves to do something about it. It doesn’t really stop with the viral websites. Every few months or so you’ll find a blog post that details how the author has had it with IE (IE6 usually) and that he has resolved to drop support for the browser completely.
One must ask: are any of them making a significant difference in the market share of IE? Or IE6, specifically?
I don't think so. Here at pingVision, nearly every one of our clients requires IE6 compatibility for their web projects, and I don't think that's because they're unthinking or naive about browsers. The fact is that their audience -- and, quite often, their own organizations -- are locked into IE6 by their IT departments.
Will 37 Signals' dropping of IE6 support make a dent in their market? Perhaps not, since their audience is probably already heavily skewed towards Firefox anyway. But our B2B clients would likely see a huge drop-off in traffic if their sites did not support the IE6 that still permeates corporate desktops and workstations the world over.
Still, what we have here is a tax on productivity, and if Microsoft did one thing to help the online economy, it would simply EOL IE6 altogether. Right. Now.
Meanwhile, we'll consider adding the "Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 Tax" to our estimates as a line item for all clients to see.
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- Company: Web Design
- Tags: Internet Explorer, IE6, browsers, business
Comments
Mattapus writes:
"Hallelujah"! You sing it sista'!
gingercat writes:
Huzzah to that! Non-developers always thing I'm exaggerating when I say I spend as much time making IE6 work as I do on the rest of my front-end development. How much better would our designs and interfaces be if that time were spent on creating and building instead of hacking--or dumbing them down to make budgets and timelines?
Lauren Roth writes:
"I don't think so. Here at pingVision, nearly every one of our clients requires IE6 compatibility for their web projects, and I don't think that's because they're unthinking or naive about browsers. The fact is that their audience -- and, quite often, their own organizations -- are locked into IE6 by their IT departments."
This is how "market realities" and statistics perpetuate the status quo - there is money attached and therefore risk. It is hard, as a designer, to continually remind myself that a marketer's forte is to cater to what people already want or are easily convinced is a problem they need a solution for.
I would love to think that if the average user (and IT department) knew what a PITA supporting IE6 is they would download other browsers (easy right?). It is well known within our community, at the very least. The more we all talk about this problem, the better, I think, until IE comes out with a truly competitive (from a design perspective) browser and not one people use just because it's already installed.
A tax would be a fascinating way to open the question with your clients who, unfortunately, must cater to these people. I do not mean to snob or deem them plebs, but some initiation on our part to spread the word could do us all some good.
"IE 6 is not supported, please download Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome or... etc..." Sounds funny and obnoxious, because it is.
It is my hope that the IE6 market share will decline over time, but it is unlikely to do so unless we find a way to actively encourage other browser use. It is my hope that more follow the example of 37 signals until it simply becomes common practice. If I could find a way to subtly (and persuasively) get users to download other browsers without an "incompatibility" drop window, I would.
Matt Tucker writes:
The good news, is that it is. IE6 market share dropped below 25% recently. Sadly, over 71% of users still use some version of IE, but at least the majority are moving towards modern browsers. If you are curious, here are the most recent stats.
Source: Net Applications, inc.
Greg Hines writes:
I don't see IE6 going away any time soon. At least not to levels where it can be "safely" ignored (generally accepted to be well under 5% market share). Part of the problem is that many very large companies have decided to forgo Vista because their XP deployments are adequate and stable (read: relatively cheap to support since their costs have already been sunk). Most of these companies will continue using XP until Windows 7 is released, and even then probably not before Windows 7 SP1 is released. We're looking at 2010 to 2011 at this point. The other segment of IE6 users is home users who don't know (or care) to upgrade their browser. These IE6 users will disappear as they replace their seven-year-old computers and get a new OS with a new browser, which they won't update for another seven years (unless it updates for them).
And while there is undoubtedly an IE tax, I think the tax varies by themer and project. Projects with incredibly complex designs are more likely to have problems in IE6 than are projects with less-complex designs (and I don't mean plain, either... this very site required very little IE6-specific grooming).
Some themers will struggle with IE6 at every step because their hate for it fundamentally alters how they work with it. They'll ignore IE6 as much as possible and only open it up when they've nearly finished implementing the design, which is when they have the least amount of flexibility for dealing with browser issues. And it's much harder and much more time-consuming to fix browser issues at this stage than fixing them as they appear.
Other themers accept that supporting IE6 is a necessity. They'll keep in mind the limitations of IE6 and avoid using techniques that may cause significant problems in IE6 and they'll check their work regularly (for best results, any large change should be checked in all browsers anyway). With this workflow, you'll still need an occasional
* htmlhack (or separate IE6 stylesheet) to work around the occasional margin or float bug, but those tend to be few and far between.I'm one of those latter themers, and for most projects (including those I did at pingV), I probably spend no more than 5% of my time--possibly 10% for complex themes--working around browser bugs. I've known a few others over the years (none at pingV, I'm happy to report) that will struggle with IE6 for nearly as long as you mentioned, Laura, but those aren't people I'd want to hire to work on my site because, at best, they're not delivering much value for what they charge. That's what real professionals are for: delivering great work at a good value.
Sorry for the epically-long comment. ;)
IE6 Needs to go Away writes:
I'm very happy to see this article. I'm not an active reader, but found your article through a random Google Search.
Although I may agree with comments that 40% time-tax would be high, I completely disagree with the premise of 5%. People may have some JavaScripts or other tools/methods in place for added compatability which is great, but I'm guessing they didn't add any upfront time to that estimate or back-end time for support calls in regards to bogus IE6 specific bugs.
Beyond theme development ... IE6 is severely behind the times in JavaScript support and I've run into several support situations where the users need to upgrade their service pack in order to even view portions of a site driven by "Ajaxified" components.
LET'S TRUMPET THIS TOO:
If you cannot get out of IE6 for some reason, please make sure you have the most recent SERVICE PACK! ... There are millions of incident reports out there for JavaScript using XP SP2 ... DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200, upgrade to SP3 or whatever is the newest ...
Even Microsoft would save money on development time if this 7+ year old browser would GO-AWAY!
My estimate: 20%-25%
Matt // Le Blog Exuberance writes:
I'm happy to see someone else calling Explorer 6 what it is: a tragic drain on productivity. I had a similar idea and wrote about this in March 2006 on my blog: "The Explorer Tax: How Microsoft's buggy browser costs us billions of dollars."
In the many Google Analytics accounts I access, it's been good to see IE6's market share decline over the years, but, indeed, any general audience website still needs to account for IE6's bugs.
Death and Explorer 6 taxes, oh yeah.
Jeff from qualtity electronics writes:
Firefox is increasing in popularity even with new versions of IE available firefox allows for the most customization and that's why most people us it.
Google Chrome falls short to Firefox 3 as well. The many features and reliability are unmatched.
IE6 shouldn't be an issue at this point for any site owner. They simply need to get a new browser.
Preston So writes:
There is, of course, the alternative of taking the IE6 tax away from productivity and channeling it into the user's browser speeds. Dean Edwards created a JavaScript library designed to make IE6 behave like a standards-compliant browser such as Firefox (including components like PNG transparency and CSS problems). And this was before IE7 was even released.
Downside: the user suffers from having to download the .js file, but that's what they got for not upgrading!
Personally, I find that using conditional comments works effectively for very small issues but after trying out this script I'm sold.