July 20th, 2009
The IE6 support equation: Is it worth supporting?
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
