Which browsers to support?

by Craig on 11/10/2011

I have been working on a massive project at work, and today was the day I decided to start tackling the relatively small pile of compatibility issues (all with Internet Explorer). I did the usual thing, opened my Virtual Machine with all the flavours of Internet Explorer and set to work, first with the most recent, working backwards.

Version 9 was nice and easy, few float issues, but nothing major. Version 8 freaked out a little, but a conditional stylesheet brought it into line pretty sharpish. 7 needed a little bit more work, navigation bar hovers were appearing behind other elements and it was the whole

position: relative;
z-index:1;

issue, so that didn’t require too much work. Then I opened 6, the dreaded version and it was a complete mess.

After an hours worth of work, I decided to check the site analytics, IE 6 had 2.7% of the usage, so I came to a conclusion.

“We’re not going to support browsers with less than 3.5% and that are 5 years or older.”

What do you think? Is that crazy? I want to be driving the web forward, and not having to fight with older browsers to give an “okay” user experience.

There are 2 comments in this article:

  1. 12/9/2011Ben Corlett says:

    Could not agree more!

    I have had a couple of projects for clients in China (I’m from Australia) and unfortunately, IE6 makes up like 30% of their usage. Which means that I had to support it :/

    This website is interesting (I think this is the URL): http://www.ie6countdowm.com

  2. 01/9/2012Marco Monteiro says:

    Currently I only support IE7+, but I’m in the process of only support IE8+ since Microsoft is making the browser updates mandatory. So windows XP will all be updated to IE8 and Vista / Windows 7 will have IE9. This is great news for developers :)

    cheers

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