For one of our recent website developments, we decided to assess whether or not Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 compatibility was still necessary for new sites being developed today.

Our motives were simple – We wanted to be able remove the need for all those horrible work-rounds that IE6 demands of today’s web developers. I have in mind here things like the hover event used by menus based on unordered lists and the lack of support for properties such as first-child that give added flexibility to CSS.

Sadly, our findings have revealed evidence that there is still a large user-base for this venerable browser. According to the W3C, there were still 14.5% of users with IE6. Another site, that collates browser usage statistics (www.upsdell.com) cited figures that generally indicated a range of 13% to 27% (excluding a high of 63% for the EWS statistics, although EWS uses a different way of acquiring and categorising figures). Lastly, we have a value of 33% cited by www.thecounter.com.

The conclusion seems obvious: IE6 remains a significant browser to be considered in current web developments. We feel that this is in large due to the continuing use of older operating systems such as Windows 98 (and to a lesser extent NT4), that cannot be upgraded to more recent versions of Internet Explorer. Sadly, older operating systems tend to run on older hardware, which means that the option of running more modern gecko-based browsers, with their additional bloat is not always an option.

It seems then, that for the time being at least, IE6 compatibility can only be ignored in systems where the type and version of browser can be more strictly controlled (e.g. intranet systems).