Moving on from IE6 (forcing the issue)

I'm not a developer (Andy does all the clever stuff), I dable.

What strikes me though when developing sites and apps for the internet is the amount of 'voice' regarding how horrible developing for IE6 is.

You spend all this time putting together a nice site or app which sits nicely in Firefox, Safari and Chrome - then load it in IE and despair....sigh, you then move through the site hacking it to play nicely with IE6. This can be a tremendous amount of work depending on what features you implement into a site.

We then despair that things are not moving on and we have to keep doing this extra work for our clients.

We've recently introduced a simple policy - if you want IE6 support then you have to pay extra.

And any personal work (for instance my own site), I have simply dropped support for anything below IE7.

What strikes me is unless the web-developers stop supporting IE 6 then the problem will never go-away. We're the guys that drive it, so if we make the point that the site wont work in IE6 then people will have to move on and upgrade their browsers.

People don't like change, so if a site sits pretty and functional in IE6 then why should they upgrade?

Naturally there is a slim possibility you might loose some work by not actively supporting IE6, but if most clients understand that for the web to evolve they need to help evolve it by NOT supporting a dated engine, then I think you'll find many will support it (and for those that don't they simply pay extra).

There are many ways to let users know they really should be moving on. I use a very simple method (which is probably not the most efficient):

<!--[if IE 6]>
		< meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=ie6.html" />
		< script type="text/javascript">
		/* <![CDATA[ */
		window.top.location = './ie6.html';
		/* ]]> */
		</script>
<![endif]-->

I then display a simple page telling the user to go upgrade, and give them some links to the latest browsers. One day I will make a pretty version of this, but for now it gets the point across.

If enough developers make the stand then in the long-run the web will be a happier place....