IE6 is down to 1.25% in North America. It's dead. Please stop supporting it
I wish. Our B2B ecommerce system has 34% IE6 usage, as of last week (although this has shrunk by half over the past year or so). I cannot tell 1/3 of our users to shape up -- especially since the ones that aren't upgrading are doing so because they're so big it's incredibly difficult for them. In other words, the ones still in IE6 are also the 800lb gorilla customers, to whom we can't make such demands.
Same here. I currently work for a company that sells office supplies (not exciting, but it pays the bills). We get lots of traffic from corporate types, schools, offices etc and have high numbers for IE6/7.
I would love to stop supporting it, but my boss is unwilling to just stop earning the £100k+ a year they bring in.
What I'm getting at is that you should support what matters to your business. If your users are IE based, then you must support IE, plain and simple.
Working in B2B in the UK, many companies (especially financial services and government) are still heavily entrenched in IE6.
While my default position is to build for modern browsers, these kind of clients will insist on IE6 support, and however much it goes against our best intentions sometimes the customer's insistance is final.
I think it's absolutely fine to tell them you develop using the latest standards and you charge more when you have to develop for expired or non standards.
Sometimes our company is developing sites for internal systems. We have to support IE6 only, cannot use any plugins and even cannot use Javascript (it's blocked). We call this a challenge, not a sad thing...
How well would they respond to enticements instead of demands? I'm thinking something along the lines of "get these new features for free if you upgrade to an HTML5-capable browser."
Yep, progressive enhancement. Have features that only show up for modern browsers, and announce them separately or at the top of any upgrade/version announcement or changelog.
I'm not sure that would work - in my experience, the reason that they are still on IE6 is they have hundreds of seats to upgrade and, more importantly, the entire network has been totally locked down over the years to deal with IE6 issues - giving the network admins a known surface to protect.
For example one of my client's clients has a rule that disallows Ajax HTTP POSTs - when I asked why they said "security - and it's not going to change".
So upgrading isn't a technical or a feature request - it's a total mindset change.
I wish. Our B2B ecommerce system has 34% IE6 usage, as of last week (although this has shrunk by half over the past year or so). I cannot tell 1/3 of our users to shape up -- especially since the ones that aren't upgrading are doing so because they're so big it's incredibly difficult for them. In other words, the ones still in IE6 are also the 800lb gorilla customers, to whom we can't make such demands.