A recent conversation with a web consultant I had got on the topic of browser support. I asked “What browsers do you support?”. He responded with the list of the usual “modern” ones: IE7+, Chrome, Firefox, Safari. “How about IE6?” I inquired. “Well, it is a hassle. What I usually do is add an extra charge for IE6 compatability. When the clients sees it, they usually drop that requirement. Normally, if you ask them whether it is important to support IE6, they say yes and then it’s your headache. But showing them the price tag seems to work well.”
This makes sense to me: making the cost of IE6 explicit is something that can hasten the departure from supporting this legacy browsers. People tend to be very careful with their money when they feel they are not getting the greatest return on it, and I have a feeling that a lot of clients would not want to spend extra on making sure their site works in the half-dead zombie that is IE6.
#1 by Ruben Berenguel on September 29, 2010 - 1:03 pm
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It is indeed a clever solution. But I wonder how much do you need to charge for it to be really effective. A 10% surplus? 5%? A fixed amount (like say 100$?).
Cheers,
Ruben
Latest at my blog: 4 Reasons Why Pacman Is a Metaphor for Blogging
#2 by Steve on September 29, 2010 - 1:06 pm
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I have used this technique for well over a year now and it works well. In most cases IE6 drops off the requirement list for public sites (I still ensure it’s not BADLY broken…) Only case where it was a requirement was an internal app in a company that still had IE6 as the official spec for their office machines. And they paid.
#3 by Vivek on September 29, 2010 - 1:07 pm
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Lol! Innovative way to fight against IE6
#4 by Ben Truyman on September 29, 2010 - 1:28 pm
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That might work for smaller freelance work but I’ve never met a client that would trade the cost of supporting IE6 vs. the loss in profits that would result.
#5 by Irae on September 29, 2010 - 2:12 pm
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Better off with IE8+ and charging extra for IE6 & 7. At least for me, supporting IE7 is so similar then IE6 that don’t make a difference. Besides, IE7 market share is lower then IE6.
IE7 has a somehow better CSS support, but in Javascript is the same hell as IE6. So why to sell them appart?
#6 by Ben Alabaster on September 29, 2010 - 2:27 pm
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The problem with the abandoning of IE6 though is not for developers of new products, it’s for shops that are stuck with applications that cannot/haven’t/aren’t being upgraded.
Their ‘unwillingness’ to upgrade is usually tied to applications that they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars locking them into the browser, it’s not just a matter of their I.T. department not wanting to upgrade to a newer browser.
Your IE6 compatibility tax needs to be pretty hefty to warrant their throwing away their previous investment to roll out a new browser just because of your say so.
Your idealism is commendable, I would equally like to see the back of IE6, but as developers we’re paying the price for the lack of foresight of our predecessors, and for the lock-in that Microsoft wanted with their browser. Well, they got lock-in, and now we’re feeling the pain.
What we need is a shell that has the capability of loading each of the engines based on meta data in the pages of the application.
I wrote a blog post on this very subject with one potential long term solution back in April:
http://www.endswithsaurus.com/2010/04/why-isnt-browser-rendering-engine.html
A unified shell that could load any of the browsers’ display engines at will, via a notification in the meta tags of the html, whether it be Firefox 3.6, IE6, Google Chrome 7, IE9.
#7 by F1LT3R on September 29, 2010 - 2:29 pm
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I can confirm that this works for you and your client.
#8 by Kent Fenwick on September 29, 2010 - 4:10 pm
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Hey Igor,
Great article! I agree and do this with all of my clients.
I don’t rip them off, but I make it clear that if they want the bells and whistles of Chrome, FF, Safari etc, then it will take more time and money to do the same in IE6.
If the design is simple enough, we do it for free without even telling them, but to make sure it doesn’t affect budgets and timelines we make this statement up-front.
Typically, they do want IE6 compatibility and are willing to wait for it.
Thanks for sharing!
Kent
#9 by Stephen Watt on September 29, 2010 - 4:16 pm
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Wonderful idea!
#10 by Jonathan Yarbor on September 29, 2010 - 5:10 pm
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This is what I have always done. I don’t put a huge price tag on it, but I do include it in the invoice.
#11 by R P on September 29, 2010 - 5:26 pm
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I support the fight of IE6, I tell my customers the price of not having features that later browsers support is higher than the half-dead zombies out there.. Besides, those zombies cant truly be a good surfing zombies as they must be blind to miss all the goodies that later browsers offer… so the answer is? lets not worry about IE6.
#12 by David A Brown on September 29, 2010 - 6:13 pm
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Wholehearted agree with this approach as I’ve done the same thing recently. I got our company to stop plowing time into fixing IE6 issues by showing them in real terms what the costs are for our team to do so compared to the conversions we were seeing from IE6 users and how much they represented in terms of profit.
Development is now a dream in comparison and we can focus on the really cool things without worrying about whether our ideas will work for IE6; the occasional height:1% in an if IE7 block is MUCH easier than being utterly, utterly perplexed by some of the craziness IE6 would bring!
#13 by Dave Rosen on September 29, 2010 - 7:29 pm
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We’ve been doing this for awhile with good results. We’re do a lot of PSD to HTML work and initially had IE6 by default. We started to give people the option of a discounted rate to skip IE6, and advised people on if they really needed it or not. Everyone wins this way. Great your doing it too!
#14 by WinBlows on September 29, 2010 - 8:39 pm
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There’s a beta-release of a new version of IE which supports hardware-acceleration. The test programs were developed by microsoft, and show how much faster IE is compared to other browsers…Of course, the test programs were funded by Microsoft, and every-single-Microsoft-funded-test-program (so far) has been designed to sabotage the performance of other browsers.
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/
“IE is 60 times faster than other browsers”
Sure, whatever man. I’ll wait until there are third-party tests
#15 by WinBlows on September 29, 2010 - 8:45 pm
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IE 9 ‘apparently’ has hardware-acceleration. Microsoft says it’s “60 times faster than other browsers”, and you can try it for yourself here:
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/
Of course, these are Microsoft-funded tests, and every-single-Microsoft-funded-test (so far) has been designed to sabotage the performance of other browsers.
I’ll wait for third-party tests before I ever believe anything Microsoft ever says, ever.
Something to note:
It doesn’t matter how fast your computer is, IE9 gets 60fps, and other browsers get 1fps…
If it were a legitimate test of hardware acceleration, wouldn’t the speed of your hardware be a factor in the framerate?
#16 by War on September 29, 2010 - 10:22 pm
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Best advice ever. Facebook Like. Would FB Like Again, AAA+++++
Die Internet Exploder!
#17 by Kunal on September 29, 2010 - 11:20 pm
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Whoa!! For a consultant, it is definitely going to work. However for a organization, who would like their product to work across all the browser, might take time to adopt IE6 price tag idea.
Anyways pretty clever!! thumbs up!
#18 by Jonathan on September 30, 2010 - 12:08 am
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That is exactly what we do at our firm. We figure if you want a mobile version you pay extra, if you want an extra feature you pay extra, and if you want ie6, you pay extra.
That said, usually send ie6 a basic layout and styling set of css so it is readable, anything beyond that is extra
#19 by hmm on September 30, 2010 - 1:44 am
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not that clever. as ie6 has ~2% ( http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp ) of market share site owners need to think if they want to miss out on ~2% of their visitors is cost>profits. of course it depends on your site needs, visitors demographics etc.
#20 by Brian Lopez on September 30, 2010 - 3:20 am
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And seriously, to you dev teams out there that have any ounce of say in the estimation process for a project – PLEASE assume this same level of push for supporting or continuing to support IE6 on the project.
Just push back and say it’ll take “extra time” from the features that matter. It’s not like you’re lying to them
#21 by Abhigyan on September 30, 2010 - 6:54 am
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Gr8 trick, But what to do if you are working on your own project and your 60% users are using IE6??
But i believe less website supporting IE6 will increase usage of IE7+
#22 by Ranjith Siji on September 30, 2010 - 8:20 am
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Yes That is great. I am also doing this trick to avoid IE 6 . Who developed this creapy browser. Creating Lot of Problems.
#23 by Stefan on September 30, 2010 - 8:30 am
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This makes absolute sense. It’s more effort to support IE6 than to support all other modern browsers (Mac and Windows)…
#24 by Sean on September 30, 2010 - 8:39 am
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This is exactly what I have been doing for the last 2 years. IE6 development can be up to 30% of development costs to ensure a browser experience on par with other “modern” browsers.
While clients will end up not supporting IE6, sometime at the end of projects about half my clients will come back saying, “It doesn’t work” — “In what browser?” — “IE” — “Which version?” — “6″ — “Ah ha!”. Then they ask for the browser support. At least I walk out being able to charge for it, but it boils down to the target demographic.
If the end user is going to primarily or significantly access a site from work, I find IE6 becomes important to support.
#25 by Dave Hemming on September 30, 2010 - 8:52 am
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Sadly, I work for the government and would desperately like to use a browser other than IE6 but I can’t. And when the government commisions work, it’s always for IE6. Are you going to say, “well that’s extra” ? You just lost that fat government contract…
#26 by Bas on September 30, 2010 - 9:34 am
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or you could make an exploit that would install Firefox and set it as standard
#27 by SynePDX on September 30, 2010 - 10:18 am
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I might start doing this for IE in general.
#28 by Matt on September 30, 2010 - 10:38 am
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Then they will go price out other designers and you’ll lose the business. Sad but true. Too many people willing to do the work for less.
#29 by sheena on September 30, 2010 - 11:05 am
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I completely agree with you… and it is normally a good way to avoid the IE6 hassle.
Normally if you explain that that browser is almost 10 years old, non-standards compliant and also that less than 10% of people around the world still use it (most likely not their target audience) then they are better able to see why it’s not worth the extra cost and effort.
#30 by Irfan Suleman on September 30, 2010 - 11:08 am
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Agree, that’s the way it should be…
#31 by Matt Alexander on September 30, 2010 - 1:01 pm
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Yes, I do this.
#32 by free government grants on September 30, 2010 - 4:52 pm
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Valuable info. Lucky me I found your site by accident, I bookmarked it.
#33 by enrico nencini on September 30, 2010 - 7:21 pm
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And that’s probably the only way to fight it. People actually having a need for ie6 support would (and should already do) pay for it anyway as an extra-deluxe-bonus, the rest of the customers sayin naaaay would bring just less headaches when it comes to press that “publish” button and of course less money that you would probably have spent to cure them headaches anyways.
#34 by eglasius on September 30, 2010 - 8:39 pm
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Right on, sometimes we are so involved in our projects that we forget the basics of how the world works. Don´t forget to also put that nice overlay that prompts IE6 users to upgrade, before you start getting weird reports no one can explain.
#35 by MonkeyDonkey on October 1, 2010 - 2:43 am
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I do it the same way since about 2 years and you are right, that simply works.
In German we have a saying: What’s free is nothing worth (sounds better in German…
) Means to me if you give them IE6 compatibility for free they don’t even think about that they just take it, but if it’s not free they have to decide if it’s worth the money or not and most of the time it’s not.
#36 by Marton Sari on October 1, 2010 - 7:18 am
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Overdiscussed topic. (Sorry for being despiriting.)
#37 by Mercury Rising on October 3, 2010 - 10:49 pm
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There’s no shame in avoiding IE6.
Applications tied to a 10 year old browser – give me a break. Tell a CEO, owner, manager, etc. they can’t have a new computer because the cost of upgrading their software in order to meet the compatibility requirements of the new machine is too costly. Do you really think Office 2010 can run on a Pentium 4 with 512K of RAM?
One main reason to support IE6 has to do with your target audience, and if that’s the case, I really don’t think we should be jumping through hoops to offer them eye-candy; simply say, “IE6 was not meant to do that; it’s a 10 year old car that needs a lot of repair.” Heck maybe we should send them to another directory just for IE6 like some people did for Flash sites ; )
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