Magento & IE6: Kill IE6

Written by sander on Aug 06, 2009 | 4 Comments

There is a lot of talk on IE6 lately. Digg and YouTube now don’t support IE6 anymore for (parts of) functionality on their sites. As mentioned in a Computerworld article, supporting IE6 can mean a lot of extra development effort. Magento is a pretty HTML/CSS/JavaScript heavy platform. Because of the many possible workarounds needed for IE6 when you have a complex website, I’ve noticed up to 50% increases in development effort as well to get it supported. Because of that, I am now an avid supporter of the Kill IE6 movement and proud bearer of the Kill IE6 ribbon on Twitter

p.s.:

Of course, I won’t be going so far as to block users from websites or forcing them to upgrade to IE6. Possibly blocking or sending away 30% of your potential buyers on an eCommerce / Magento platform is of course a ragingly bad idea…

The Author of this post is sander

Versatile web enthusiast. Specialized in e-commerce and the technology behind that.

4 Responses »

Mark van der Sanden Says:
August 17, 2009 at 8:49 pm

As with all cross-browser development, it’s a matter of calculating. On e-commerce sites it’s even easier: look at the statistics of your old website (or a website with a similar target audience) and see what percentage of your visitors uses IE6.

If it costs you more than, say, about a year profit of your IE6 visitors, you shouldn’t bother about that few users that still refuse to (or can’t) upgrade to a newer IE version.

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Sander Says:
August 27, 2009 at 3:32 pm

The obvious question then is where to draw the line… I suppose that’s case-by-case. B2B shops should probably never block IE6 for instance.

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Erwin Says:
March 25, 2011 at 10:25 am

I know this is kind of an old topic, but we’ve recently came up with a little module that making writing CSS for ie6 a little more comfortable – since you’ll have to test for IE6 anyway (for 3 years at least). By installing our (free) module BodyClassPlus the visitors browser and platform are added as classes to your templates body. This means you could write browser specific CSS in your normal styles.css file like this:

.ie {…}
.ie6 {…}

etc.

Might be handy!
Regards

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sander Says:
April 28, 2011 at 9:03 pm

Thanks Erwin, that indeed looks handy!

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