20 July 2009

[www] Is It Worth It To Support IE6? YOU Do The Math!

2160.The buzz has it that MS Internet Explorer 6 is going to the digital graveyard: if you had any doubts, consider that YouTube – which supports just about anything (well, anything worth using), is ending IE6 support and will soon not play nicely with it, and will give you a link to download IE7 (though I'd suggest you'd at least go with Firefox or Safari).

If all that doesn't convince you, maybe this will. Web developer/branding guru/marketing maven Brian Cray has created a quick equation that anyone with even a few brain-cells of web-savvy can use to determine the cost of supporting what's quickly becoming a digital dinosaur. It's from a marketing and e-commerce standpoint, but I think it has a point to make about unproductive effort in general.

In his example, if your website makes $0.10/visit, if 100 of those visits use IE6, if it costs you $20/hour to employ a web design specialist and it takes them 4 hours to fix IE6 problems, then you're losing $70/hour just for supporting IE6.

Here's the article. Do the math. Can you afford the time and trouble to support this? If you're aim isn't to make money off your website, and given that you can't get that development time back, is it really worth it?

(All my cards on the table here: I run a Mac and use Firefox 3.5. The last version of MSIE I can run is 5, as MSFT stopped developing for the Mac with version 6. Sometimes I load MSIE 5 for Mac just for the nostalgia of it.)

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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Die IE 6, Die! I wonder if Arbitron (the radio ratings people) could improve their new web-based software faster by making at least IE 7 the standard. Fortunately, they are trying to make it compatible in Firefox for Mac users soon, too.