The IE6 support equation: Is it worth supporting?

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In a chat today someone was complaining about supporting IE6, and I see this all the time. But the problem remains: How do I convince my clients that IE6 on their parent’s PC doesn’t matter? It comes down to dollars.

So I wrote out an equation for deciding if you should support IE6. It’s bulletproof and simple to calculate. Have fun kissing IE6 goodbye.

The equation is…

average sales per visitor * IE6 visits – (designer cost per hour * hours required to fix IE6)

Note that this is to be calculated on monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.

Example

  • Website earns an average of $.10 (10 cents) a visitor
  • 100 monthly visits are using IE6
  • Designer gets paid $20/hour
  • Designer spends about 4 hours fixing IE6 every month

Here’s how that would work out:

1 * 10 – (20 * 4) = 10 – 80 = -70

In other words, you’re losing $70 by supporting IE6. And this is a very small example and it doesn’t even take into account the lost opportunity of providing a richer experience to >IE6 users

19 comments skip to comment form

  1. Missy said— 9 hours later

    The question is an absolute no brainer.

    If you’re developing a commercial website you should be supporting every browser that features high in the customer’s traffic statistics.

    Where I work, this is currently IE6, IE7, IE8, Safari and Firefox 3. Three versions of IE feature high because most of our customers use out site while they are at work, and hence use a browser not of their choosing. When we look at stats on a by-hour basis, Safari users appear more in the later hours of the day, i.e. those using out site from home.

    These days there is no reason for any web desogmer/developer not to be able to stabilise CSS across (say) several versions of IE… and WITHOUT hacks and conditional comments.

    Anyone who thinks that IE6 is a dinosaur is sorely mistaken. And anyone who designs for the browser he/or she prefers should not be in this industry.

    #1

  2. gagal said— 11 hours later

    but but but IE6 IS a dinosaur. Its’ javascript engine alone makes satans’ eyes water, not to speak of the horrid css support and mystical incantations/goat sacrifices required to make things work on that elder god.

    #2

  3. amy k said— 12 hours later

    Interesting equation, but it doesn’t consider the clients whose corporate networks are strictly limited to IE6 and who thus require the media-rich sites they desire to work flawlessly in their own viewing environments. I like the idea of being able to put a dollar amount to the cost of this support, but the missing factor is the cost to our clients of upgrading entire national organizations, and the training time, bug fix time, and time spent answering questions like “where did X go?” that goes along with that effort. I’d love to see that equation.

    #3

  4. djp said— 12 hours later

    amy k: the equation handles your situation just fine, in your scenario 100% of the users will be on ie6….

    #4

  5. Brian Cray said— 12 hours later

    Amy: DJP is right. In your case, it would certainly be worth supporting IE6! LOL :)

    #5

  6. Gerrit said— 15 hours later

    “Designer spends about 4 hours fixing IE6 every month” That’s very unrealistic. On most projects, I spend 4 hours _once_ for fixing IE issues.

    #6

  7. Nick Yeoman said— 17 hours later

    I like your equation, I do a few e-commerce sites where visits turn into a lot more than 7 cents, so it is stupid not to optimize for ie6.

    However, I do optimize most my sites for IE6 for practice as the more you do it, the less time it takes.

    #7

  8. Vic said— 3 days later

    When a users cannot get your site to work for them, the assumption is that your site is busted.

    If they bother to report the problem at all and your answer is that they need to upgrade their browsers, the assumption is that doing business with you is a hassle.

    For sites with the goal of selling a product, you have to look at the necessity of supporting rich media when a much simpler site can achieve the same ends.

    Designers typically want to use the latest and greatest tools and tricks they have available to develop new abilities and skills. Business owners shouldn’t get hooked in with that.

    #8

  9. KiT said— 3 days later

    The cost for fixing IE6 is calculated only once, not every month (or so). As the number of visitors rise (let’s hope), the gap between the cost and gain gets narrower and it will finally exceed the cost :)

    #9

  10. Brian Cray said— 3 days later

    Vic: All good points! Operating at a loss is never good business practice though. If you have the IE6 users to justify the cost, then it’s worth it. If not, it’s not.

    #10

  11. Brian Cray said— 3 days later

    KiT: Depends on how often you change content. Bigger websites have many pages and some of which change frequently enough to warrant regular IE6 maintenance.

    #11

  12. Brian J King said— 3 days later

    I just say let IE6 die, the visitors that are using it are not likely to earn you any money anyway (clicking on PPC AdSense ads, purchasing e-commerce goods, etc.) Additionally the overall development time costs the customer that is paying the web developer more money to develop for IE6 compliance will be far greater then it’s what they would lose as @briancray clearly demonstrates above.

    Additionally – this is why you can’t go to the store and buy parts for vintage cars at Wal-Mart, you need to go to a specialty shop.

    Focus on the mainstream browsers, unless all your visitors are all only using IE6 I say don’t develop for it. That’s easy to find out through AWStats or Google Analytics, etc.

    #12

  13. Matt said— 1 week later

    Amy: You might want to check out your main nav in IE6.

    #13

  14. Matt said— 1 week later

    Oops. Sorry. My comment was really for Missy.

    #14

  15. Ali said— 2 weeks later

    I think we’ve reached the point where it’s fair to start charging extra for IE6 support, and even then you can easily contribute to the cause by sneaking in something like http://ie6update.com/

    Unless like some other commenters have mentioned, you have a closed user group that is forced to use IE6, it’s a serious drain on resources to support the browser. As a web developer you bill your clients per hour. Would they rather you spent billable time on making the site better or making it look perfect on an obsolete browser?

    #15

  16. craig said— 5 months later

    If commercial website, just abandon ie6 users, focus on developing advance feature for firefox users. We want microsoft IE out of business!

    If other websites, just abandon ie6 users as well. LOL.

    #16

  17. Tijmen said— 6 months later

    Your equation is silly…

    If my customer goes to our website, it has to work. Period, end of discussion.

    #17

  18. Ian said— 10 months later

    “Period, end of discussion.”

    Oh really? Not if I start it up again.

    We leave out compatibility of IE6 unless our client needs it. If they do, we charge an extra percentage on top of the HTML/CSS build. Easy. :-)

    #18

  19. Glen Yoshioka said— 11 months later

    Wouldn’t it be nice if Microsoft updated IE and it just so happened to use webkit? Gosh that would be great. Seriously Microsoft should get out of the browser business.

    #19

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