I read a terrific blog post recently at QuirksMode called ‚”State of the Browsers — IE edition.” Aside from predicting the future usage of IE browser versions, the article called for web developers to charge extra for IE 6 support.
Why is IE 6 so slow to die? The answer — corporate intranets. Corporate intranets are often built on antiquated technology, and unlike public sites, they aren’t frequently re-developed since ROI is lower. They aren’t going away, so people that browse at work will continue to use IE 6.
Why would a web development firm charge 20-30% more for the development of a site to include IE 6 support?
We develop sites to support IE 6 nearly all of the time, but it takes significantly more time since IE 6 doesn’t fully support today’s web standards. What looks great on other browsers can look terribly broken in IE 6. In nearly every case, we have to create a special stylesheet specifically for IE 6.
Since we’re testing on IE 6, IE 7 and now IE 8, there’s also significant hardware and software costs. As far as I’m aware, there is no way to have all three browsers on a single install of Windows.’ To fully test, you’ll need three Windows licenses and three computers. That’s a lot of added cost when I can use one machine to test all of the other browsers.
Update on July 29, 2009: Thanks to some feedback on Twitter and some further probing, I found a nice article called 13 Ways to Browser Test and Validate Your Work that mentions a couple of applications that allow for testing in multiple IE browser versions (see ways 9 & 10 in the article). Internet Explorer Collection allows for testing in multiple standalone versions of Internet Explorer.
IE 6 isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s always best to examine your web analytics to determine if a significant number of people are using IE 6 to access a site. If you’re re-developing your public web site and you require IE 6 support, be prepared to pay slightly more for development costs.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Blue Acorn says:
We’ve also been considering our plans to phase out supporting IE6 as a standard service for our development efforts, and moving towards a “pay extra if you want it” type format as well. I think every developer wishes IE6 would finally die, but it lingers, and some people still use it, so we still design to accommodate it.
But Rick, there are a few tools we use to cross browser test not only for IE but also other platforms (Mac) by using MS Virtual PC, or a free utility called IETester, and Adobe has recently released a cross browser testing tool (in limited release). This way we can test from a single development workstation without worrying about a separate machine for each install. Maybe after you implement one of these you won’t need your other “IE testing machines” anymore and you can send one our way =)
July 9th, 2009 at 5:35 am
S??ren Sprog?? says:
There’s plenty of ways to run multiple versions if IE on one machine. Either by virtualization (like VMware) or utils like Blue Acorn mention. Just go Google it.
In Denmark where I’m from 13% of all users still use IE6. Not so much because of corporate intranets, but because some institutions (banks, gov. etc.) is slow to roll out new versions of software. Their (wrong) standpoint is, if it works then there’s no reason in investing resources in upgrading large numbers of PC’s. When they get a new PC, they’ll get an upgrade.
Lately though a lot of the most visited online media sites in Denmark has started a campaign against IE6, showing a prominent “please upgrade your browser” box on their frontpage. But the campaign hasn’t really done a lot to the market share of IE6, prolly because it is not enough to convince corporate IT-managers to start an upgrade process.
And of course, those managers should be taken out back and [edited]