Should You Phase Out IE 6 Testing as Designer?

Did you ever hear the story of the Zen Master?”  I think we need to wait and see. IF we get a huge drop in IE 6 requests, THEN we can begin phasing it out completely from our testing.

But IE 6 Sucks!

Yes, it does. But losing business sucks more. Spending a few more hours on a site can help the client. For each client, I think we need to check their server logs and determine their traffic. It takes about 3 minutes of work to determine their audience and will help our clients.” 

• If a client has a HUGE population of IE 6 users (like 10% or more), then we have to still code for them. I could easily see this happening if our clients have older customers, lower socio-economic customers, or customers in developing countries. Why?”  Because they probably have older computers.
• If they have a 5% or less share we can just drop features and make small work arounds.
• If they have a 1% market share we can just ignore completely – just like we do for poor Opera.

My Gut Feeling

I have a sneaky feeling that it will be not a dramatic drop as we want. I would love to see our server stats go from 4.6% to 0% in the next few months. I just don’t think it will happen. I think it will continue trending down, but by next year we will only be a few percentage points lower.

Big Question – Our Web Site and Our Clients Sites

The big question is should we cater to 4.6% of our audience. I ran our numbers and that is the number of visitors that came back – see attached chart. I say yes, we should still provide a solid experience in IE6. However, we can kill any fancy features and just do basic things.

In the last month we had 700 visitors in IE 6. That is quite a few people (20 to 30 a day). We had an inquiry just today from an IE 6 user. Yes, I know a mere coincidence, but still there are people who don’t use it.Would you design your store or restaurant to exclude 5% of your traffic?”  No.

I did run a report and since August we have had 40 inquiries with IE6 as the browser (about 8% of our overall inquiries via the web form). So, would we want to lose 8% of our business?”  At this time, I don’t think we would want to do that.

So, says the Zen Master….we’ll see.