Can we band together to kill off IE6?

[Jason Garber]

I'm making a proposal to the appropriate committee that we kill off IE6 by putting a message on our site that we'll stop supporting IE6 on August 27, 2009 (the 8th anniversary of its release). Of course it would work a lot better if all of higher-ed did it together. Norway did it with great success. Who's with me?!

Attached is a screenshot of what I'm proposing. The pseudo-infobar would appear at the top of all pages (in conditional comments so just IE < 7 shows it). The links both point to the page in the screenshot.

Can we form a coalition to get it done?

[Charlie Triplett]

Why stop at IE 6?

I've stopped fully supporting IE6 and 7, but part of the trouble isn't the users. It's the IT departments at work. Perhaps by harassing/encouraging users to put pressure on IT folks, it will happen sooner.

I have a conditional statement that encourages IE users to upgrade to Firefox, Safari, or Chrome. I may move it out of the footer this summer to put pressure on our own IT department.

[Jason Garber]

Wow. I'd have a much harder time making the case to the committee for IE7. It's too new; too many users; not quite the dinosaur IE6 is.

Thankfully, our IT department is very with it for their own computers. Firefox is the default browser on all PCs. On campus, the percentage of visits to the site with IE6 is 0.3%. Off-campus U.S., though, is 12.5%.

[Rick Stutz]

IE7 is still at around 43% of our users based on last month's analytics.
IE6 is still at 12%. We've dropped future support for it. Luckily, IT and Marketing function quite well together, so no issues there.

Not to derail the topic, but have you guys dropped support for 800x600 yet?

[Charlie Triplett]

800x600 is still about 2-3% of my users, which amounts to hundreds of people who would have difficulty accessing all content on the site, so I haven't. But frankly, I don't know what I'd do with an extra couple hundred pixels anyway...

[Jason Garber]

Yes, we did in 2007. Our site is 900px wide. 4% of our visitors report an 800x600 resolution. Nobody complains to us though, probably because most web sites are > 800px these days.

[Ryan]

I'm not even able to even get some importantly-placed people on campus to stop using Netscape Navigator. I doubt I'll have much success at this.

[Michael Futreal]

I feel your pain, Ryan. We had Navigator 4 around forever. Now, it's IE6 that we can't get past. Close to 20% of our traffic -- and a lot of that is traffic that originates on campus.

[Chad Hietala]

We have dropped support for IE6 and I am going to try to push to drop support for IE 7 in good time. Bad thing is IE 8 is not really that much better. I think doing a browser check and prompting the user that their version is no longer supported and may alter how the page is viewed is a good idea.

[Nathan Eggen]

The end of IE6 will be a wonderful day - it would save 100s of hours of time in testing + development to drop it for our CMS. Unfortunately with Win XP being supported by MSFT at some level until 2014 (!!) IE6 will be in the game at some IT houses for a good deal longer.