I run a web design company and as part of the discovery process, we ask questions to figure out whether or not big corporations, schools, gov. agencies, etc, are part of their core target audience. We also look at their existing analytics data if they have it. If they have visitors using IE6, we just assume that we're going to need to support IE6 and adjust the price according. There is no good reason to make the customer feel bad that they have to pay more because their clients are using a dipshit browser (most of them are probably being forced to do so.)
Now if I determine that their core audience won't be using IE6, I explain the issues pertaining to IE6, how it takes more time to make everything work as intended and give them the facts of browser/version distribution. If they want, we'll support IE6 for them (because we are here to help them make money and even though I hate IE6, I'm not religious about the hate) for the extra cost.
I'm confused. Are you or are you not notifying your customers of the added expense of supporting IE6? If you are, then I don't see how your method differs from what is stated in the post. No one is making their client "feel bad" about a business decision. Whether or not they do is more a function of how that unfortunate news is delivered, or perhaps whether or not they irrationally view IE6 support as mission-critical.
If we determine that it's in their best interest to support IE6, we don't line-item IE6 support (i.e. we don't say IE6 will cost you $xxxx extra.) We simply quote them a price that includes that cost (i.e. your website will cost $xxxx.)
If we determine that support IE6 will likely not matter, we break it out as an extra line-item cost and give them the option to support IE6 by paying extra. We explain the facts of their situation and let them make the decision.
It's not about making them feel bad. It's just human nature. It's just a more pleasant experience just paying a price and knowing it'll just work instead of having to pay more than the regular price just to make it work.
I see what you're saying, but it might still be useful for them to know what trade-offs are being made.
Like, "for this site and audience, we recommend supporting IE6. But FYI, that does eat this much of our costs, which can't be spent on shiny new features for modern browsers. So maybe for other projects, if you do something that targets a different audience, we'll want to make a different trade-off."
If I were the client, I think I'd appreciate that info. It might affect what types of sites I want to launch, for example.
If big companies are part of your core audience, they are part of your core audience. At that point IE 6 support is not optional, nor is pushing back on it going to make a difference. All you'll do is cause annoyance.
For some simple brochure sites, it's 4-6 hrs more of testing & tweaking during the lifecycle of the project, which usually translates to $500ish extra. i.e. 10-25% of the project.
For involved sites, it just depends what is being done and whether you're trying to replicate the experience or if you're just creating a graceful degradation for IE6 users, which is often "good enough" for a lot of clients.
For basic "looks the same" stuff this is probably true. The difficulty comes from clients who devise features that only work well on newer browsers, then insist on keeping the same functionality rather than "degrade gracefully" on IE6.
This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him more desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually increased.
I wonder how applicable this phenomenon is here. You could easily become known as the "ie6 web design experts" who corporate drones turn to first. Sure, you'd make tons of money, but is that what you really want?
[EDIT: Lots of us are constantly dealing with the trade-off between whoring ourselves out for high paying shit work and doing what we really want. Just sayin'.]
I think you're letting the allure of the money downplay the costs of actually doing the work. It's not like one client is going to hand you a duffel bag full of $100 bills, you do the conversion once, and then you're set for life. It's going to be a seemingly endless line of enterprise clients who already have a history of not keeping up with the times.
The amount these clients pay, while substantial, probably won't provide you with the "fuck you"-money needed to never have to do it again.
If it matters that much to you, just say "no" when they ask if you support IE6. However, I agree with the article: it's a good strategy which seems to have worked for at least one person.
> And if the subcontractor does crappy work, the client will think you did a crappy job.
If you passed through your subcontractors work without reviewing it, you did do a crappy job.
> I would think that if the subcontractor was good enough not to do bad work, he/she would also not want to do IE6 compatibility work.
That's assuming a lot about other peoples priorities. You'll be surprised how many perfectly qualified people who does not place the same premium on creative freedom you do.
If you find yourself with a lot of well-paid IE6 work, spending some time on elance finding someone good to offload it to and putting him on a handsome retainer could turn out to be a very good investment.
If you're jacking up prices in an attempt to drive away business, I think you can afford to buy pretty good work. But if we go by your logic, no good IE6 compatibility work ever gets done, so expectations will be low anyway.
In this case, what's more likely is that some customers will see the extra cost for IE6 as an unfair charge and just not use your services at all. I don't agree with them necessarily but put yourself in their place: They are not responsible for the state of Internet browsers and for Microsoft's low browser quality.
So if you apply this otherwise good practice, make sure you communicate it well and price it very transparently. After selling someone of the wonderful benefit of a beautiful web application or site, it's always hard to backtrack and say that standard web applications like browsers actually can get very clunky and that some will cost a lot to support.
> Sure, you'd make tons of money, but is that what you really want?
Well sure, that's why you've been agreeing to do it for that price. If doing it so much makes it not worth it, increase the price even more, eventually demand has to decrease.
The thing is I don't see the business case for paying extra money for IE6 compatibility, at least not any serious amount. After all, Windows Update is free.
I don't think so. As a consultant you can always structure your products in a way where the core browsers are always included, but the weird ones are extra. Naturally, the always-included ones will be the more standards compliant ones since chances are that if it works in, say, Safari it will also mostly work in Chrome.
This is the way I've approached the issue for sometime, and the analogy I always use with clients to explain the additional cost is one of translation. Most browsers speak english, or some basic dialect of english. I can deal with those dialects. IE6 speaks Chinese. It costs more money to translate the site into Chinese. People seem to understand that analogy.
End users at large enterprise companies have zero say in the support browsers of that organization. These policies are put in place by their IT organization which in some cases manages all applications and patches that are pushed down to an individual's machines. In those large companies even Windows patches are managed in house and not through the standard Windows update process. I think those companies will easily stomach an additional charge for IE6 since they're used to paying for everything else. That said, I'm sure they'll use their size to attempt to negotiate themselves a better price.
TL;DR => Most users in large enterprises cannot get rid of IE6 even if they want to.
I working for a large company (100,000+ employees) in the US and we are stuck with IE6. We cannot uninstall or upgrade it without admin rights, which 99% of employees do not have.
A small minority of tech-savvy employees use Chrome or Firefox, but this is heavily frowned upon. Once when my hard disk crashed, our internal tech support team tried to blame the fact that I use Firefox instead of IE6 as the reason.
You'd be shocked at how much very expensive enterprise software has never been updated to support anything newer than IE6. It's not that enterprises don't want to upgrade their users, but that their hands are largely tied (hooray for Chrome Frame!).
Africa and Asia lead in IE6 by almost 25%. I was surprised, but it does make sense -- pirated XP comes with IE6, people can't use Windows Update, so they just stick with it.
Interestingly, some specific countries (namely the Phillipines and Indonesia) have a much lower IE6 usage than their equally poor neighbours, due to a very high market share of Firefox.
Another interesting fact: Both Taiwan (40%) and South Korea (43%) have piracy rates comparable to Singapore (37%), but 5-6 times more IE6 users (32-38% vs 6%). The correlation is not particularly strong there. Other factors might be at play.
In South Korea, for example, all payment gateways and government portals are required by law to have certain "security features", which can only be implemented as an ActiveX control. (Good luck with security!) That explains the 94%+ IE adoption rate. Also, all those ActiveX controls break every time a new version of IE comes out, so users are understandably reluctant to move away from IE6. In fact, I've heard rumors that the only reason IE8 still supports ActiveX is that the South Korean government specifically requested it.
Of course, China and India together totally skew the statistics. Each of them is bigger than everybody else combined.
This shouldn't classify as clever, it should be standard practice. Supporting IE6 is more difficult than other browsers, and the usefulness is highly dependent upon the specific site's demographics et al, so putting the decision to the site owner and making clear that IE6 support translates to either sacrifices in other parts of the project or increased total project cost is very much the correct course of action.
Many users of IE6 have no choice of browser. It's either IE6 or nothing. They're forced to use it because many large companies have IE6 as they're single browser on the desktop. Forcing an upgrade of all the clients in a company to IE7, 8, or another browser can be a large effort. The end users have zero control to upgrade their own browser or install other software.
An upgrade also requires that all internal applications built for IE6 are also updated. That's an even larger headache if one or more of those applications were built by an external vendor. I know a large company(4500+ employees) that recently upgraded from IE6 to IE7 internally. It was a MAJOR effort at significant cost to make this change.
At this point its naive to think that majority of IE6 usage is based on the individual home or business user who has control over their workstation and could upgrade with the press of a button.
If you choose to dump support for IE6, understand that you're making the choice against some large organizations. And make sure you communicate this to your clients as well if you're building a site for them. If you're ok with that, go for it. Charging more to support IE6 is reasonable, but make sure you're clear with your clients that there ARE reasons to support IE6. Let them make an informed decision rather than based on the bias of a developer who doesn't want the hassle.
Thank you. Thank you so much for articulating this.
I'd like to add that historical site analytics should always be a factor in the web developer's decision to support IE6 or not - and in my experience, B2B companies almost always have 40+ percent of users still on IE6.
Yes, we all want IE6 to die. Yes, it makes life harder for us in the development community.
But telling a client that "you can save money on your website if we ignore IE6" is inherently disingenuous, unless your client is already a web technologies expert (and if they're outsourcing web development, I'm doubting that this is the case). Nine times out of ten, the client will jump on the cost-saving opportunity, you will avoid the hassle of developing for backwards compatibility, and you'll feel good for having just stabbed IE6 in the kidney. But when the client's site analytics say that 40% of the customer base is still on IE6 (and this is typical in my experience) then you'll be costing them FAR more in lost business than you'll be saving them in web development costs.
I hate IE6 too... but there's more to it than just the added cost of development - and as stated earlier, many users simply don't have a choice in the matter.
Again - when you're dealing with outside vendors and you have internal applications which rely on browser compatibility you can only move to IE8 if the applications support IE8 - which they don't. So, IE7 is the current ceiling. It sucks, but it's the reality.
I do this as well, and have had the same experience. IE 6 support is suddenly no longer as important. I explain that I'll put a message up that directs the user to either upgrade their browser, install Chrome Frame or browse at their own peril.
Of course the problem with this strategy is that you may not be in a vacuum. If I'm a competing shop I simply say that I'll do it all for a price somewhat south of your +IE6 price.
And if I have some experienced webdevs who have done this type of stuff since forever, the cost is already largely locked in. Sure I may not be "helping the web" (whatever that means), it may mean a substantial boost in revenue.
I recently had out a RFP for some construction work. One guy called me and told me to call him back when I've got some offers, he'd knock 10% off the lowest one.
Needless to say, I said thanks, hung up, laughed and crossed his name off the list of candidates.
Then you've dropped too low. You certainly don't do it for $1. But I've found that whenever there are other companies with ideological bents (like anti-IE6) I can almost certainly always crush them economically and with respect to quality.
Competing aggressively on price, more often than not, attracts a certain type of client. If you're taking the cheap option now, you'll often fight over every cent going forward and be pretty miserable to work with.
If someone is desperate for work, they might need to make sacrifices to keep busy. I'm not, so I try not to.
It's not all that aggressive. If your intention is to effectively price out technology X (IE6), I can almost always beat your price by a good mile, and I'll make a point of it.
I think you underestimate the huge price differentials for almost no difference in quality. In fact often quote the opposite. I've seen a factor of 5x in price difference in some cases with virtually no difference in portfolio, mockups, or code quality.
That's fine, but I (a hypothetical web designer) am selecting for clients who don't actually care to do IE6 compatibility work, but would try to get it if it were the same price.
As another poster mentioned, it's a demographics issue. Right now, I'm working on a site used in US K-12 schools, and IE6 usage is around 5%. It doesn't sound like much, but our client can easily justify supporting IE6 based on marginal revenue. We have a large Google Web Toolkit application, so IE6 wrangling is limited to CSS and performance hell -- the JS differences are compiled away.
If you're developing a consumer app, you're probably in pretty good shape though. Some friends at a consumer-focused webshop report IE6 rates < 3%. Furthermore, most of that 3% probably have Firefox installed and could use it easily if they were told that the site wasn't IE6 compatible. So, for them, the ROI of IE6 support is probably quite negative.
I've made the same suggestion to my company and we are going to adopt a pricing policy for IE6 in our future product releases (B2B). The bottom line is that it costs us more to support IE6 and it's a sunk cost. We've eaten the cost for a long time because we care about making our customers happy no matter the circumstance. However, on the verge of IE9 and HTML5, supporting IE6 is starting to show measurable effects on our development velocity, capability, and agility which impacts all of our customers regardless of browser.
I suspect many IT depts and software companies are eating this cost and it reduces the impetus to upgrade browsers. Business cares about the bottom line and they won't consider changes unless they see line items that will affect it.
I actually have a friend whose design shop has been doing this for a while. It really drives the point home.
The issues with getting large corporations to finally upgrade are moot. The consumer/home user is already abandoning IE6 because people like us are advising them to. Large companies aren't going to incur the cost of an upgrade until they have to. They don't have to as long as people keep supporting IE6. With the current amount of web traffic coming from IE6 hovering around 12% (last time I checked) it really depends on whether or not an organization needs to reach those visitors with an experience that is on par with users of other browsers. Putting a price tag on it is perfect.
If a client wants IE6, why not tell them to spend that money developing an accessible version of the site? There are going to be more disabled people visiting their site then IE6 anyway:
I think we should remember why IE6 continues to burden us. All those companies spending millions adding Citrix and MS Terminal services to their network many years ago need a few more to get their ROI back. In these cash strapped times I can't see an already over stretched IT department putting together an operating system upgrade for 600+ desktops.
I develop a web based app and it's a nightmare adding those awful hacks to get IE6 to play ball. However, many companies are stuck with IE6 and do you want to alienate a potential customer(s)?
I don't mean the IT department upgrading their own computers, they probably already done so, I mean as a company. If they run an old citrix or MS TS then they're locked into XP. I've seen this first hand. A lot of global companies haven't upgraded to the latest version and continue to run Software that even Microsoft no longer supports!
I used to do html/css layouts very frequently just a few years back, and after tracking my hours to determine this, I found that coding for IE6 idiosyncrasies essentially doubled my html/css dev time.
So I'd have a layout done and ready to go in Safari, Opera and Firefox (Chrome wasn't on the market then) in 4 hours, and it'd take another 4 just to get it working correctly in IE6.
Luckily though, I billed hourly (so it was never really a problem), but it just amazed me to realize how much money clients were throwing away trying to support IE6 at the time.
Many people keep talking about "driving the point home" like the majority of people using IE6 are doing so by choice. Gmail doesn't work, Youtube soon won't work, site after site that people use for personal browsing are limiting IE6 users or shutting them out. Which begs the question why are there still IE6 users. I propose the simple answer - the majority of IE6 are corporate users. Those who have no control over their browser.
I'm not going to be redundant, but I spelled this out further down the page and I think it's been mostly ignored. If you want to cut off corporations using IE6 from getting to your site - go for it. Just be aware and let you clients know this is what they're doing.
This is what we do too, but this isn't going to kill IE6. It's not a problem that sites support it, it's a problem that large companies and non-techies don't want to or know how to upgrade. What I do for all my sites is add http://pushuptheweb.com/ to all my pages and customize the message to say they're not getting the full experience and that their browser may be unsecure.
I disagree, I think that techniques like this do contribute to killing IE6. The reason that corporations don't upgrade their browsers is pretty simple: they don't have to. As it stands now, IE6 is "good enough" for their employees to do whatever it is they need to do.
The more websites that drop IE6 support, the more IE6 becomes "not good enough", and the more pressure accumulates for corporations to upgrade. Right now it's more practical in many environments for the IT group to stick with IE6 than upgrade. The day it becomes more practical to upgrade than stay put is the day IE6 dies.
However, large corporations that aren't upgrading probably aren't encouraging, nor do they want, their workers to be visiting cutting edge sites. Usually the computers/browsers are used for company intranet stuff, which doesn't require advanced features. If anything keeping workers from visiting new, cool, cutting edge sites (regardless of what they may be) would actually be incentive to stay with IE6. I do concede, though, that there probably is a fair amount of necessary browsing to other client websites, distributors, etc that needs done.
Security: "Complex software will always have vulnerabilities and motivated adversaries will always work to discover and take advantage of them. There is no evidence that upgrading away from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure. Regular software patching and updating will help defend against the latest threats. The Government continues to work with Microsoft and other internet browser suppliers to understand the security of the products used by HMG, including Internet Explorer and we welcome the work that Microsoft are continuing do on delivering security solutions which are deployed as quickly as possible to all Internet Explorer users."
Cost: "It is not straightforward for HMG departments to upgrade IE versions on their systems. Upgrading these systems to IE8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users. To test all the web applications currently used by HMG departments can take months at significant potential cost to the taxpayer. It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users."
Pretty hard to argue against without deteriorating into a "no it isn't", "yes it is", which gets us nowhere.
So with the UK government, and it's 'standards' for it's various departments, standing firm, cautious businesses will follow the same path as well.
The more websites that drop IE6 support, the less people will use those websites. Facebook and Youtube are fairly safe in ignorning IE6 since that makes it easier for businesses and government departments to stop non-business use of their infrastructure.
Talk of raising prices to cater for IE6 suit me just fine. I've been dealing with IE6 since it was launched, so I'm fairly fluent in dealing with the issues it has. It's part of my job as a web developer, to build websites that work in web browsers.
Supporting IE6 isn't a big deal. It's all about clean separation of layers, progressive enhancement, and a decent understanding of IE6's foibles. Unless you've chosen to use a framework or code-generation toolkit that gets those basics wrong, and prevents you from fixing the corresponding HTML, CSS and JavaScript layers.
Those arguments can be used to put off adopting any technical advance. While it may be wise not to follow a policy of early adoption, eventually there's a tipping point that will force one to embrace the present. The disadvantages of protecting IE6 will soon outweigh any advantage of using it. Hopefully, the UK government will be lucky when it pins itself to the next platform.
I work as a product designer for different web apps. We just support the latest build of IE, Chrome, Fx, Opera, Safari - that's still alot of differences.
Given how "quirky" IE6 is, a "run as IE6" mode would be a lot of work. (Of course, they now offload the work to everyone else, but that's not their problem is it?)
The company I work for simply have ask if the client requires IE6 support, but states that they "recommend not supporting the 9 year old browser". That seems to discourage all but government clients.
Or you could just give them a 101 on web standards, while giving the main points why you wont support IE6. It almost depends on your clients. ie: Since most MLS programs are still in the dinosaur age, most Realtors use Windows, and good % of them still use IE6(I've seen the analytics), crazy eh?
Governments and other big organizations REFUSE to update their browsers because they need IE 6 to support legacy software (I used to work in provincial government in Canada: I know). Spouting off about "web standards" (whatever that means to a client) is worthless -- they'll tell you it still looks wrong.
Tell them IE6 costs extra and at least your trouble will be worth your while (or you can skip IE6 dev time). It's not unlike paying more to the mechanic who works on vintage Mini Coopers versus new BMW ones; the vintage skill is more specialized and harder work in lessening demand.
I agree with charging extra. It's a good tactic to see if they understand, as they certainly will understand spending more money, vs supporting web standards.
While we all sympathize with your stance, the author's is more reasonable.
For the client, it's really quite simple: it takes some extra hours of work to support IE6, which costs X dollars in labor. For a given site, not having IE6 support will drive away Y dollars in user revenue. If supporting it makes them more money, they should want to. If it loses money, they shouldn't.
Making this trade-off explicit with a client is good. And I think it's also reasonable to charge a premium on those hours of IE6 support, since they are extra-frustrating.
HOW frustrating it is for you will affect the premium you charge. And for you the tradeoff is more like this: am I willing to lose business with clients because they think I'm unreasonable in my IE6 support fees? Are the dollars lost made up for by happiness at work?
As long as you're thinking it through, do what you want.
Now if I determine that their core audience won't be using IE6, I explain the issues pertaining to IE6, how it takes more time to make everything work as intended and give them the facts of browser/version distribution. If they want, we'll support IE6 for them (because we are here to help them make money and even though I hate IE6, I'm not religious about the hate) for the extra cost.