Online Marketing Blog from Radical

For starters I am not as upset as the title may imply! Although I am starting to think that IE is an inside joke that stands for In-Excusable. Imagine how much further along the internet design world would be if we didn’t have to focus so much of our brain power on making this (I)n-(E)excuse of a web browser work properly.

I won’t get into all the nitty-gritty details of what exactly are the issues we face with this browser (frankly there are too many and I worry about my bandwidth…). The main problems from a design perspective is PNG transparency which is not supported, and the Box Model, where IE 6 will always incorrectly expand any dimensionally restricted block element so that oversize content is unable to overflow.

There are workarounds and hacks available to attack these (I)n (E)usable faults. The sacrifice there is that they bloat the nice clean code that we work so hard to achieve and even worse can invalidate it. No point going over the workarounds here as there are thousands of posts out there explaining and tackling the problem already. I am more interested in the attitudes of designers out there and their dedication to IE6 and the earlier browsers.

The majority of designers out there whose books I have studied and derive inspiration from have started to turn their backs on IE6, no longer supporting it in their web building, mainly because they feel it detracts from the end user experience. As the numbers that follow will show, there are still (in web time) a few ancient users of these antiquated browsers. As long as there are at least a couple percentage points of users still using the browser is it wrong to abandon them?

The Numbers…

On a positive note, it looks like things are shifting away from the (I)inherently (E)vil browser. Usage in the last year alone has dropped by almost 50% from 32.0% in January 2008 to 19.6% in December 2008.  (taken from w3schools.com)

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Where did this 13% go you ask? Well, about 5% have upgraded to IE7 and 8% shifted over to Firefox, happy days.

One stat that surprised me was 2.7% using Safari. Safari, the default browser on Apple computers is available for both Mac and PC’s. It would seem that the only ones using Safari are the diehard Mac freaks, looking at the numbers I would bet that a high percentage of the 44.4% of Firefox users are doing so on a Mac computer. (Myself included) The ability to customize Firefox with add-ons makes it a slam dunk in my books, but that is an argument for another post… soon! Interestingly, Google’s Chrome browser, in typical Google performance has already surpassed Safari with 3.6% of usage.

So fellow designers out there…. here are the questions. Do you take in to account the limitations of the older browsers when you are designing your sites? Do you have in your mind a cool idea that you refrain from using because you know the problems you’ll be faced when having to code it up? Will you follow the lead of some of the designers at the forefront of our industry and abandon a small percentage of users, claiming you are trying to improve their experience by leaving them behind???

Thoughts?

One thought to leave you with. We recently received a screenshot back from one of our clients regarding a site we have been working on for them, the browser they were viewing with? Internet Explorer 4.0! Remember that one? Didn’t think so…