In truth, the idea of having to provide support is insanity. What would happen if you called up Dell to get support for your 8 year old PC? Or, perhaps closer to home, called up Microsoft for Windows Me support? Obviously, you’d be told to take a flying leap, though probably in a much nicer way. Yet, the web is different. When you code for the offline world, you get to specify where your application will and won’t work. Don’t want to support Mac, then don’t. Only want to work with Vista, no problem. But online, users come to your site with a million varying specs (operating systems and versions, browsers and versions, screen resolutions, etc), and all must be supported or you might lose a potential sale or just a potential visitor that could translate into greater consumption of your content or higher click-through rates on ads.

It’s all about market-share. If only 1% of users are using one browser, you can probably neglect support for that browser and still be fine. However, IE6’s numbers (even post IE7) were hanging high in 40-50% market-share. It’s a little harder to say “No Thank You” to half your site visitors. Now, IE6 is only holding on to somewhere in the neighbor of a quarter of the browser market-share (source: Net Applications). While still a significant chunk, this does free up some greater opportunities for us as web developers.

We can’t afford to simply deny support. But with IE8 now in beta and likely to be released sometime in 2009 (speculation), it seems like something should be done to push or encourage IE6 users to move on to something better.

My suggestion is to start a campaign of gentle nudging. Thanks to conditional comments, it’s possible to call in Javascript or additional CSS for IE6 users only. In so doing, we can begin placing upgrade messages in conspicuous places on our sites. They can still have the content and, sure, we’ll make sure it still looks just as good for them, but they’ll also get little notices telling them they should upgrade. What’s wrong with that? Since, IE6 is so old, it’s inherently less secure than other browsers, so telling them to upgrade is more a public service than a nag.

There should be conditions to this, though:

• The site, as much as possible, should still function in IE6 as it does in other browsers. Simply disabling the site to IE6 users will make the message of upgrading lose its impact.
• The message should be actionable. Telling them to upgrade is not enough; you must show them how and where or point them to some place where they can get that info.
• The message should not be rude. We all despise IE6, but remember that our hate is towards the browser, not the people using it. Many times these people are simply uninformed or don’t understand why upgrading is important.
• The message should not recommend one particular browser. I love Firefox, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what they upgrade to as long as it’s not IE6. Some users will be hesitant to download new software, but selling the idea of updating their current software (to IE7) is usually easy. Let the user decide.

There’s a couple of sites that have already done the hard part for us: creating content that gives compelling reasons to upgrade and instructions for how to do so.

Save the Developers has a bit of javascript that will place an unobtrusive message at the top of the window encouraging the user to upgrade. If the user clicks on it, they’re taken to a page listing the four major alternatives: IE7, Firefox, Safari, and Opera with a few bullets detailing the benefits of each. I like their approach. However, more in depth information is lacking, and it’s possible the user may not see the need to upgrade based on what they get.

Browse Happy from the people at Wordpress is a much more informative attempt. They explain why IE6 is bad, breakdown the alternatives, and even have testimonials from people who made the switch. They also offer badges you can add to your site, but I doubt most users would see or care to click on them.

Of course you’re more than welcome to “roll your own”, as well. The important part is that we all get behind the idea of preaching the gospel of modern browsers to the IE6 heathens. </endBillyGrahamMoment>

UPDATE 07/03/08: Eerie timing on this post, as just today, 37Signals announced they’re dumping IE6 support, effective August 15, 2008. If some more big players would jump on the band wagon, IE6 users would have little choice but to upgrade. Kudos to the 37Signals team on making the stand.

UPDATE 07/07/08: Turns out Apple is also ditching IE6 with its new MobileMe service (via 37Signals)

UPDATE 08/25/08: SitePoint’s Josh Catone just published an article asking whether it was finally time to ditch IE6 support. Give it a read, cast your vote and digg it or whatever, so we can get some more exposure to this issue.