Design and IE6

[amiman]

I am a member of a joomla template club. They about 12 months ago stopped designing for IE6 and only design fo IE7 and above.


At the moment we have IE8 and IE9 beta. When do you stop designing for older versions?

What are your thoughts on this? Should we when designing templates go that little bit extra and add extra css for IE6. Most people I know use IE8 Firefox and Chrome. I know that certain OS will not run above IE6 for instance I have a computer in the bedroom with Windows 2000 on it and it will not run above IE6.

As I am starting to design templates I would like your feedback on this.

[bruleo]

I stopped 'consideration' for IE6 ages ago, mainly due to lack of png support and also as a an encouragement to users to upgrade because of the security holes.

Just to throw another spanner in the works, sometimes an OS can affect the site display as well. I had one site that displayed perfectly with IE6/XP and IE7/Vista, but had formatting errors on IE7/XP.

Bruce.

[faber71]

is always better to be retroactive to the browser

[bruleo]

I disagree. You have to draw the line somewhere, just as a manufacturer of any product stops supporting it's products after a period of time.

IE6 is as a good a line as any, due to it's well documented security holes and complete lack of conforming to CSS standards.

If you want to build a boring, non-dynamic and low quality website, then it's easy to do for IE6, but anything more interesting, then IE6 just doesn't cut it. In fact, with the way websites are going now hand-in-hand with the growing use of super-fast broadband and the new-generation of browser appearing, it's not going to be long before IE7 is out of the window.

Bruce.

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[David]

Here on this site for the month of December we had a about 1.9% of users with IE 6.