I happened to pick up (and unfortunately buy) the April 2009 issue of .net magazine a few weeks ago and, I have to say, I have never been quite so underwhelmed. Front-cover highlighted articles included: “Come in IE6, your time is up”, “Create Dynamic Stylesheets” and “Win More Clients With The Perfect Pitch”. I was actually looking forward to having a good read, especially about the IE6 article, thinking perhaps they would put forward some effective and insightful ideas about how to “encourage” your average internet user to either upgrade their version of Internet Explorer or, even better, change to a different browser. How wrong I was, I should have skimmed the article in the shop.
Now, EVERY web designer, both professional and amateur, is aware of the rendering problems caused by IE6. The issues can, at times, seem endless, with semantically perfect code displaying very erratically, elements disappearing, etc. etc. etc. It requires a lot of workarounds and/or hacks to put right. It would be absolutely great to say “right, I’ve had enough of this, I’m not supporting IE6 anymore” and design all your future sites accordingly. The trouble with this attitude is that (again, as any web designer with any shred of professionalism will know) there are still LOADS of people using IE6.
Browser statistics are an incredibly vague estimate at best, since they are generally only recorded on technical websites, whose users tend to be more savvy about the existence of alternatives to IE, therefore skewing the results vastly in favour of browsers like Firefox, Safari and Opera. Obviously, these users are also more like to have upgraded their version of IE to at least IE7. This basically means that noone has any real idea of what proportion of the internet “population” is still using IE6. It is, however, a HELL of a lot higher than was suggested in .net.
The most recent browser stats at w3Schools state the following:
- 24.9% of people use IE7
- 17% use IE6
- 46.5% use Firefox
There are other browsers listed but these are the 3 main ones. As I mentioned before, these stats will be wildly skewed in Firefox’s favour, primarily because anyone who knows anything about the internet will be using Firefox over IE. As it says on the website linked above:
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.
Basically, the values for IE usage are massively distorted. One can safely assume that the proportion of users with IE will be significantly higher (many approximations put it at over 80%) and, again, given the technical nature of the site, you can also make the assumption that the proportion of people using IE6 will be skewed even further. It is interesting to note that,even on this technical website, 40.6% of the Internet Explorer users are still using IE6. Since this figure is likely, in reality, to be higher, this is a HUGE proportion of your potential user-base that you are going to be losing if you do not optimise for IE6.
The problem is that (most) web designers tend to put their customers (and their cutomers’ customers) first. This is generally seen as good business sense, seeing as they are the ones who are likely to be paying you. While there is such a huge proportion of people using IE6, web designers rightly tend to be a bit wary of alienating such a huge number of potential customers and users. How the hell are you supposed to say to a potential customer “Yeah, we don’t support IE6 anymore, we can’t be bothered to do the extra work”??
With this in mind (and please realise that, while the above information might sound complicated to some, all web designers will be fully aware that a huge proportion of people still use IE6), I was hoping for a stunning, insightful, intelligent and practical solution to the problems of enticing and convincing users to upgrade from IE6.
All I, and presumably many other readers, got was a full-page graphic saying “It’s Time to Unite, Bring Down IE6, Together We Will Win”. Well fuck me, that’s convincing - bollocks to my customers, I want to join the party!
The article went on to describe how Facebook and Google have declared that IE6 is “unsupported”. While this may well be the case, it’s a completely moronic statement for 2 reasons:
- Websites like Google and Facebook can afford to leave IE6 unsupported - people are likely to upgrade just so they can use them - they use them every day and increasingly can’t live without them. Who’s going to go to the trouble of upgrading their browser to access “Bob’s Landscape Gardening” website? Noone - they will just find a competitor’s site that they CAN see.
- Facebook and Google run almost perfectly in IE6. Although they might say that IE6 is unsupported, they have clearly gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to ensure that they render properly in it, therefore making the comment completely pointless. If Facebook and Google are still optimising their sites for IE6, what the hell is .net’s argument?
The best part was the “come to our site and download our graphic” saying “bring down IE6″, branded, of course, with the .net magazine logo. Yeah, I’ll be sure to put that on my next customer’s website, it’ll really spice up the ambience of the whole thing. Or maybe on my own site, so potential customers know I can’t be bothered to go to the extra trouble to ensure that their sites are seen by as many potential customers as possible. Given that the logo’s stated intention is to convince people to get rid of IE6, it really is quite surprising that they’ve designed the graphic in such a way that it would mean absolutely nothing to most internet users. “Bring down I6E” is not going to make much sense to many people. Web designers have to think about their end audience every time they make any sort of decision on a project. Given .net’s target audience, it is surprising that the magazine editors do not do the same!
I have never read a more pointless article in my life. Talk about stating the blinding obvious - I will not be buying .net magazine again, since there was very little else between the luminous pink covers to be of any interest to anyone who keeps up to date with developments in web design. “How To Win More Clients With The Perfect Pitch” was another fine example of stating the completely obvious. Advice that you should meet prospective clients face-to-face is not exactly a revolutionary idea. Other stunningly pointless advice included “Find out what their budget is”, “If you have to pitch to 12 people, it will probably be a more formal affair” and “Go into the pitch positively” - all absolute gems of wisdom from .net, thanks for that! The most annoying thing is that there are SO many incredibly exciting things happening in the world or web design and .net chooses to run with this complete and utter tripe.
The whole IE6 .net article is here:
