Downtempo LLC: Our Fantastic Blog

I’ve been asked several times recently about whether or not new websites should endeavor to support IE6. The technical merits of this idea have been discussed to death elsewhere.

This remains a great question, because it really makes you zero in on what your business goals and objectives are for browser compatibility.

Most commonly the browser discussion begins with a single question: “What percentage of internet users do we want to support with our browser policy?” Invariably, the number quoted here is 90% plus or minus 5%.

The discussion then logically flows to browser statistics, and with nearly 15% of users on IE6, it looks like the old dog has got to stay.

This is a line of reasoning that at first glance makes a lot of sense.

Let me rephrase the question slightly. If we’re strictly supporting Firefox, IE7, and IE8, that adds up to 72.9%. If we’re also supporting Safari and Chrome (both WebKit browsers with nearly identical rendering), then we’re at 82.7%.

Any effort spent supporting IE6 is an investment in that dwindling 14.4% of the internet population. And that investment is guaranteed to increase your user base by 20% or less. Moreover, this number will decline over time.

And did I mention? That investment in most cases comes at a great cost to your development team’s flexibility.

As any web developer will tell you, working with IE 6 is one of the most difficult and frustrating things they have to deal with on a daily basis, taking up a disproportionate amount of their time. Beyond that, IE 6’s support for modern web standards is very lacking, restricting what developers can create and holding the web back.

So what kind of business are you in?

If you are a Yahoo or an Amazon, with tremendous revenues, but moderating growth, it makes a lot of sense to go after that 14.4% of users with antiquated browsers. With billions of dollars in revenue, any tiny incremental improvement means big bucks.

If you are a startup you should be swinging for the fences. Shouldn’t you be focusing your investment dollars on bleeding edge features will double or triple your user base? Aren’t you looking for exponential growth rather than incremental growth?