Facebook doesn’t really support IE6
Blimey. I didn’t realise that Facebook are trending down support for IE6. The “new look” is disabled, and if you use the old look you get a big message complaining about your browser choice:
![\"You may want to upgrade your browser [from IE6]\", says Facebook](http://www.kryogenix.org/days/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/facebook-ie6.png "facebook-ie6")
'You may want to upgrade your browser (from IE6)', says Facebook
Two interesting things here: first, they recommend that you try another browser, and give a list of Firefox, Safari, and Flock as well as “upgrade to Internet Explorer 7″. Flock? I bet the Opera people are a bit hacked off about that.
Second: there have been a few cases so far of people dropping support for IE6 (MobileMe, not that that really counts because all its users are Mac people, and 37 Signals, ditto), but nothing remotely as high-profile as Facebook. This is the boot starting to descend, I think. IE6 is already the bugbear of the industry (and has been for some time: I said “Internet Explorer is the new Netscape 4” in 2005 and I was hardly the first!); how long before we see support for it drop to Netscape 4 levels of “you get the unenhanced non-JavaScript version”?
I’d like to see more people publish browser stats for their websites. Yes, they’re unreliable, yes people change their user agent, blah blah blah. They’ll give us an indication, though; how many people out there are using IE6? Google Analytics tells me that 36% of my visitors are using IE, and 37% of those are using IE6, which means that IE6 visitors to my site are down to under 15%. (If you’re not using Analytics, analog -G -A +a +B <apache logfile> will give you a browser list, as will many other things.) Other people will doubtless differ, and I’d be thoroughly interested in seeing more of these percentages from sites with a different user-base to mine. If you’re a company, tell us what percentage of your users are using IE6! We’re not going to get stats out of Google or Yahoo or the BBC, but non-behemoths will do fine here. Everyone else, start thinking: where’s the cut-off point? How low does IE6’s market share need to go before it’s reasonable to not devote extra development time to it?
“Extra” is the keyword there — people thinking “hey, Opera/Safari/Firefox 3/IE8 has less than 15% market share in my statistics, let’s cut them off, Mr. Microsoft Hater” need to consider that modern browsers don’t (or at least shouldn’t) take any extra development time to work around their idiosyncrasies. (In practice, Safari does require more extra development time than I’d like, I find, but its market share is high enough (or the idiosyncracies are infrequent enough) that supporting it is broadly worth the effort.)
So: if you have IE6 stats, publish them. If you’re a web hacker: when should we cut off the ailing IE6’s life support? Speak now…
Having a quick look at the Analytics stats for Score five, the site I’m currently working on, we’re seeing approx 72% IE and approx 37% of that being IE6 - in other words, over 25% of our users are still using IE6. More’s the pity…
19 minutes later
To see a website as popular as Facebook drop support for IE6 is certainly a step in the right direction. It’s all well and good web developers and Standards advocates dropping support but the majority of visitors to such websites are already using modern web browsers.
Visitors to my personal website are a mixed bag - the majority of the visitors come for the music so I like to think these are average Web users. It’s warming to know that only 13.08% of last month’s 3,300+ visitors are using IE6 (according to Analytics). The company website only has an IE6 user base of 19.78% too.
53 minutes later
I noticed this when I installed and used the facebook app for Prism in Ubuntu. Great app, but it sucks I can’t use the new interface. :(
57 minutes later
Eric: hang on, that’s a different problem. FB are showing you the “browser isn’t supported” thing in Prism? That’s wrong of them, if so: they’re doing browser sniffing *first*, rather than checking for capabilities and then browser sniffing afterwards. Slaps for Facebook, if so. File a bug.
75 minutes later
This month (august) on my website: 32% using IE6 (against 58,6% for IE7 and 2% for IE5.5, their were even 2 visitors using IE 5.01)
Only 5.2% of the visitors are using firefox, and 2% other browsers.
The statistics are completely different for July
43,6% using IE6, 49,1% IE7 and even one visitor using IE 3 (yes, three) (I guess that is an error of my stats program)
The site does less than 1000 unique visitors each month, and is a completely non-tech website.
I invested some time (2 years ago, when I built the site) to make the site looking ok on IE >= 5.5
91 minutes later
We are about 60% IE, split of IE within this is 70%:30% in favor of IE 7.
Thing is our web application still crashes IE6 routinely, a bug clearly fixed in IE7, but we still see nearly 20% of users persist with IE6. The bug seems to be a “IE6 can’t handle the complexity” type, rather than something more specific (although I assume there is something(s?) specific, we can’t nail it).
Probably we need a page like Facebook saying “Get a better browser”, ideally something that just does the install for them…..
Because the application is JavaScript heavy it runs a lot snappier in Firefox 3 than any other browser we’ve tried.
For quite a few of our sites Firefox 3 is the dominant browser, with IE7 close behind, and these aren’t just “techie” sites, or JavaScript heavy sites. The world is moving.
104 minutes later
Aren’t the audiences different (especially per browser)? The “cool” facebook-kids probably all have a new computer with either a hot Firefox (the original crowd that made it hot) or a new IE on daddy’s comp (the facebook-generation).
IE6 isn’t in either of those stereotypes. Cutting off support is good. Percentages will stay high on your website because of companies that fail to upgrade and people using antique windows versions where v7/8 won’t install. But that doesn’t affect facebook, since companies shut off access to facebook anyway (including the one where I work) and facebook doesn’t want old farts to subscribe: they want the young generation, that’s what advertisers are interested in also.
4 hours later
Go facebook! It’s the least people can do, dropping IE6 support. When IE8 comes out, I hope to see IE7 get the axe rapidly too. Maybe the web will actually recover from microsoft!
8 hours later
They probably don’t list Opera, because the site doesn’t fully support it. I occasionally have to switch out to FF.
10 hours later
From the Facebook developer’s blog:
10 hours later
We have 2 site demographics
One is a more technical site (around 1.5million visits):
Firefox: 56% IE:30%
IE7: 61% IE6: 38%
The other is retail and more general (around 30k visits):
Firefox: 46% IE: 41%
IE7: 57% IE6: 42%
It will be interesting to see if facebook’s change pushes these stats at all.
10 hours later
On my blog, IE is at less than 5%, thanks to fact that I left most of its “idiosyncracies” unfixed and I also added a message saying that firefox is better when a user comes with any version of IE.
I think that the right way to go is:
- disable some functionalities or design feature that take too much work on IE,
- show some kind of “please don’t use that crap” message to relevant users.
And that even if the site works well with IE; just do it for other developers or the future.
Anyway IE7 is equally broken in comparison with newer browser, so we might start working on that too.
14 hours later
Stuart, one of the biggest websites I have had the pleasure of working on anwb.nl does close to 9 million visitors a month and 35% of those are ie 6. Before you complain about that, a year ago is was 55%, so we are getting there…
16 hours later
Ronald: well put, yes. It’s always about audience; it’s interesting, even given Facebook’s trendy demographic, that their audience has low-enough IE6 figures…
19 hours later
Facebook, the bastards! They stole my idea!
In all seriousness though, it’s a good move. Like aforementioned, I’ve started implementing these notices in websites I develop because it takes far too long to debug in IE6, and with it being such an outdated browser we shouldn’t have to support it. We’re nearly at IE8, for Christ’s sake! IE6 is nearly eight years old…
20 hours later
I help to maintain a student run website for my university. The target audience is very similar to that of Facebook’s…
For 2008:
IE Overall: 62.5%
IE7 ~= 43.3%
IE6 ~= 18.5%
IE5.5 ~= 0.4%
Firefox Overall: 27.8%
Firefox 3.0.1 ~= 1.1%
Firefox 3.0 ~= 2.9%
Firefox 2.x ~= 21%
Firefox 1.x ~= 1%
Netscape ~= 0.1%
Safari ~= 5.1%
Mozilla ~= 1.1%
Opera ~= 0.9%
It made me smile to see Lynx along side a pile of mobile phone’s internal browsers towards the bottom of the rarer browsers.
What’s interesting is the fairly large number of Safari numbers in there. Bear in mind that this is the combined figures for 2008 so far, so poor adoption of Firefox 3 can be attributed to it’s release being in June.
I’m very surprised to see Facebook shunning IE6 although as a web developer I certainly welcome it!
The one thing that concerns me now is the direction that Flash and Silverlight are pushing the web in. Heres to hoping that the trend of adoption of alternative browsers continues.
20 hours later
Bummer. Maybe they should work on opening the source to their browser, and I bet they would get a better following. As it sits, only 1.6% of my visitors use Opera, and I keep a highly technical merit to my posts. Standards compliant, chat, email, RSS, blah blah blah. Most people still don’t know about Opera, and as such they’re not getting much attention outside nerds.
26 hours later
Big, UK, business-oriented website: IE=81%, IE6=52% of that.
My geeky homepage: IE=16%, IE6=34% of that. Opera=16%!!
Small web service for webmasters: IE6=3%, Opera=4%, Safari=8% (rest is Firefox and bots).
28 hours later
[...] importante es que si ingresas a la página de Facebook desde el navegador de marras, pues te pedirá que te actualices a uno mas [...]
29 hours later
[...] Leo que Facebook dejará de ser compatible con Internet Explorer 6 con la llegada de su nueva versión. Si intentamos entrar la nueva versión de Facebook con Internet Explorer 6 esta se deshabilitará y nos mostrará un mensaje nos avisa para que actualicemos Internet Explorer a su versión 7 o bien usando otro navegador como Firefox, Safari o Flock, me pregunto donde se habrán dejado el enlace a Opera. [...]
29 hours later
Brower Breakdown for blog.adamsweet.org
1. Firefox 56.41%
2. Internet Explorer 30.94%
3. Safari 4.43%
4. Mozilla 3.38%
5. Opera 2.82%
6. Konqueror 1.05%
7. Camino 0.40%
8. NetFront 0.16%
9. Netscape 0.16%
10. Playstation Portable 0.16%
Firefox top 4:
1. 3.0.1 59.29%
2. 2.0.0.16 25.43%
3. 3.0 5.43%
4. 2.0.0.14 1.57%
IE Breakdown:
1. 7.0 65.10%
2. 6.0 34.38%
3. 5.0 0.26%
4. 5.01 0.26%
46 hours later
According to my statistics, my last 500 visitors used:
250 50.00% MSIE 6.0
188 37.60% MSIE 7.0
27 5.40% Firefox 3.0.1
25 5.00% Firefox 2.0.0
5 1.00% Safari 1.2
2 0.40% Firefox 3.0
1 0.20% Firefox 1.5.0
1 0.20% Firefox 2.0
1 0.20% Mozilla 5.0
Anyway, I think it is important to point out something: Designers must build their websites in such a way they could be seen correctly on every Internet browser, even mobiles. Don’t you agree with this?
2 days later
[...] Enlace: Facebook doesnt really support ie6 [...]
2 days later
[...] Más información. No comments [...]
2 days later
[...] | Kryogenix Estas leyendo “Facebook dice adios a IE 6″ publicado el Vie, 29 Agosto 2008 por Hernan y [...]
2 days later
I run a large site, not so much in terms of the number of visitors (300K/month) but in page views (29M/month). Our site is member based and they tend to spend a lot of time on the site (45 minutes average). However, our site is perfect for determining what version of IE each of our members use because they are required to run our custom software that embeds IE(We’re seriously considering FF in the future because so many machines have corrupt IE installs).
Our members are 55+ and wealthy.
IE8 - 0%
IE7 - 69%
IE6 - 22.6%
IE5.5 - 0%
IE 5 - 1%
3 days later
[...] Kryogenix desde donde sale la nota logro entender que proponen una exclusión de los usuarios que utilicen IE [...]
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[...] Via | Kryogenix [...]
5 days later
Even though Facebook are dropping their IE6 support doesn’t necessarily mean everyone should, their demograph is young people 12 - 30 years of age, most will have either windows XP/Vista meaning they get IE7 as standard. But for the rest of us I have clients who have a high number of people still using IE6, one site in particular is for elderly people and they still run win 98 with IE 5 - 6. It’s nice to see that it’s slowly dying but sadly I think we’ll be hacking CSS for a few more years to come yet, especially for IE6 then IE7 then fingers crossed the microsoft boys don’t release the IE8 beta as the final product and do some more research into web standards.
5 days later
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9 days later
[...] figured I’d share my visiting browser statistics with my readership, after reading the writings of someone who says “I’d like to see more people publish browser stats for their websites.” I [...]
2 weeks later
Hi, I wrote an article on IE6 support just the other day. Thought I’d share my viewpoint.
3 weeks later
[...] the percentage of market share the browser has. More recently, some applications such as Basecamp, Facebook, or Apple’s MobileMe have also taken into account the amount of development stress caused to [...]
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