Comments on: When Can We Hide From IE5/Win?

By: Vijay

Vijay — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 21:28:03 +0000

see http://www.fdim.dk/?vis=page&ID=73 and http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/browser_statistics/
for more stats. i’m not usre it’s safe to drop ie5 support, we need a much larger survey, lots of people use goolgle so it would be great if they could get the info (maybe they already log such info).

By: gulliver

gulliver — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 19:43:19 +0000

I read about halfway through before biting… and it was Eric Meyer’s remark that got me.
He’s a guy for whom I have a lot of respect and his comment ‘when user logs tell you that you can. Not before then.’ is sensible and something which I won’t fault.
Instead, I’ll simply disagree and suggest support for dead browsers be dropped – instantly and without regret.
I’m not a designer – I’m a marketer. And my money is made by leading the market, not following and supporting it.
So, I advise ‘serve unstyled with a polite upgrade message’.
As JZ said years back – ‘to hell with bad browers’.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 08:23:30 +0000

Matt #93 – since the ‘browser landscape’ changes every month, this will never be ‘a needlessly repeated discussion’.
RobertF #94 – The difference is IE5 requires extra development time and usually custom code, which every other browser then has to also download. The other browsers you mention render code that’s written to the standard perfectly.
I’m not saying you automatically drop full support for it, but it does have it’s own associated costs.

By: Cowpens

Cowpens — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:20:20 +0000

I didn’t see it posted anywhere above and I don’t know if anyone really cares, but there will be a population of users on IE5.5 for the near future: The entire US Navy and Marine Corps.
We are subject to the draconian restrictions placed on us by the new Navy Marine Corps Internet (NMCI). This is an abusively large contract held by EDS Corporation. Simply, the Navy has turned over all IT assets and networks to NMCI.
All desktops are “managed” and the user has no control over what software is loaded on their machines.
Like most ogre managed IT infrastructures, they are reluctant to change. We have been told that we will always be at least one step behind on all Microsoft products. I am currently on Windows 2000 running IE5.5. When XP is retired by the rest of the world, we will get XP (and probably IE6.0 if it has moved on).
So point being, half of the US military will be using old crap for probably another year or two. They are trying to get the other military branches to hop on the NMCI bandwaggon which could mean the entire military, active and civilian, will be using outdated garbage from EDS.
Get this. They also have Netscape installed on our desktops… VERSION 4.7!!!
I’m sure we are probably a tiny fraction of the entire internet community, but it might point to similar mind-sets held by other IT managers — “If we lag behind everything by one or more generations, we won’t have to deal with all the new bugs.”

By: Mats

Mats — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 15:46:33 +0000

Realizing I’m a bit late I have a link to share: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp which shows IE5 @ 4.5%.
You could make a conscious choice and say that IE5 is too broken for you to pay any attention to it and simply not serve IE5 users a css.
Just a thought … ;) however evil it may be. I just read your book and I liked it. I am now starting to read Joe Clarks “Building Accessible Websites”.
Cheers

By: tirin

tirin — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 20:29:38 +0000

Andy,
Are you referring to IE5 as in v5.0x or do you include v5.0x – v5.5x?
This is an important distinction (see my stats and numbers above), as v5.0x is really cr*p.

By: Andy Budd

Andy Budd — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 18:08:08 +0000

As some of the above stats show, percentages mean less than the actual number of visitors. 2% sounds small, but that could equate to tens of thousands of users a month on a popular site. With visual design being the only distinguishing factor between many competing companies these days, that could equate to a lot of lost or unhappy customers.
Personally I don’t find developing for IE5 *that* onerous as long as you’re aware of the main bugs. Sure it would be nice to get rid of “box model hacks” but in the last site I developed I used less than a handful of IE5 specific workarounds and most of these were only needed to get that pixel perfect look.
On saying that, a couple of bugs IE5 did take me take me the best part of a day to track down and fix :-) However in all honesty this was due to my stubborn desire to know what was going on, rather than any real need to fix the issues.

By: Brian Johnson

Brian Johnson — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 06:14:56 +0000

I pray for the day IE5 is finally gone. My stats say 4.89% IE5 and minor versions during the last 12 months, 4.12% during the last 3 months. For some reason I think Microsoft would be better off releasing IE7 instead of pushing Service Pack after Service Pack that nobody uses anyway. I’m sure that this would bring another decrease in IE5 users. Oh well, waiting for Longhorn…

By: Ryan Oswald

Ryan Oswald — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 02:26:31 +0000

I just want to be a designer. I don’t care about XHTSS XSLMRSS PHPCP XMLST CSSATOM, just let me design! I want to be creative and design a site and manage it. I don’t want my floats and absolutes to position unrelatively while I’m structuring my xhtml doctype cause I have to CHMOD my MovableType CMS for my blogging. So somebody please get this stuff working.

By: Sally Carson

Sally Carson — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 22:57:54 +0000

I work at an electronics retail site that gets roughly 250,000 visitors per week. Probably around 8% of our users are MSIE 5.x for PC.
We’ve seen an exponential increase in the number of Mozilla users in the last 6 months, that number increased 2% in the last month alone! Mozilla is up to 10% on our site now.