This sparked a long and heated debate in a number of web design agencies and clients I am working with (or have worked with / for), whether it would be worth just dropping the support for Internet Explorer 6 and ask users to upgrade their browsers so that they can enjoy the website to the fullest.

Coming from a usability, accessibility, SEO and web dev background, I thought it might be a good idea writing why I would recommend supporting (or not supporting) IE6 in the industry I am working for.

Looking at our industry – what made IE6 stay

With the release of Windows XP in October 2001, users were greeted to the new – bundled – version of Internet Explorer 6. Companies, schools and universities planning on buying new hardware tended to use resellers such as Dell to buy a number of same-spec machines at a bulk discount – and with all machines either shipping with XP or Win2000, the reign of IE6 was established.

Some stock-checking and invoicing software would only work with IE6

System admins were able to roll out updates and software easily, as all machines were virtually the same, and keeping control of networks became relatively easy. Additionally, intranet software was bought or developed based on IE6, since every machine came with it this made development and testing a lot quicker and easier.

In November 2005, FireFox 1.5 became the first real free browser on the market to rival IE6 for its ease of use, and coupled with the ability to extend the browser’s capabilities through extensions it became the browser of choice – if you had the ability to choose. You see, the browser (just like 95% of all applications) needed to be installed. This wasn’t a problem on your own personal computer, but when trying to do this in an office environment (or any institution) then things were a bit more difficult: most users were not given administration rights to their machines to prevent abuse or installing malicious software. Most software requests had to go through a number of channels, from procurement (if licensing was involved) to IT (to see how much work was involved and how much time would be required per machine) to head of department (to sign the request off and add additional reasons for the request) to someone a lot higher up to ultimately sign the request off. A simple “Can I have software XYZ” could easily take months to get it approved.

Internet Explorer 7 was released on 18 October 2006

With the arrival of Windows Vista and Server 2008 in October 2006, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7, 5 years after the release of IE6. At that time, IE7 was only available for Vista and Server 2008 machines, and it was not until October 2007 that IE7 was officially available for XP machines. Companies were once again given the option to roll out IE7 to every machine under their care, however this didn’t happen: rolling out IE7 to all machines in bigger companies or institutions would not only cost a lot of time and – more importantly – money (system admin time, potential upgrade costs, etc), but the software used for business purposes (such as stock management software, accounting or counter software) was built on or running on IE6, most of the time exclusively, and paying for this software to be upgraded was a very expensive option (and sometimes the company that wrote the software did not even exist anymore).

As such, IE6 came to stay with us, and it will probably do so for a long time to come unless Microsoft was to offer free upgrades to companies and allow backwards compatibility of IE6, if only at least for the software and not for the browser use. And I somehow cannot see that happen.

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Affecting your target audience

Now this was the general “industry” as we have it out there this year. What needs to be considered is how much of that sector fits into your target audience. Every website offers different bits of information, services or products, and each website has a different target audience with different needs or requirements and expectations of the website (if you read my article on information architecture and user testing you will be aware of different user scenarios to test a website with).

The main target audience I am dealing with is the travel and tourism industry. Our target traffic (based on a survey conducted in Jan / Feb 2008 by three of my clients) is coming from:

• Users at work, looking at holiday packages and destinations at work during their breaks – ~ 65%
• Users at home, either planning with the family or reading up on what they found at work – ~35%

Just over two thirds of traffic is coming from people using company / education networks. Depending on your target audience it might be a good idea to look at where your main traffic is coming from to paint your own picture for your market.

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IE6 today – the stats

Let’s have a look at Google Analytics. These are the June / July stats of a holiday cottage provider based in the UK (we are looking at a slow month):

Web stats from a holiday cottage provider. IE accounts for 71% of the traffic

Interesting picture, almost three quarters of all traffic is coming from Internet Explorer.

Let’s break it down:

22% of IE-using visitors are using IE6. Interstingly, a very small number are still using IE5.x

About 16% of all visitors are using IE6 to browse the website, read more information about the product or destination and make a booking. A fifth of all bookings are made using IE6 – very interesting fact to keep in mind.

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Debunking some myths about IE6

Now having looked at the stats and a brief history, let’s have a look at some of the most commonly used phrases in the last couple of weeks from my industry:

Myth 1 – No one uses ie6 any more

Looking at the stats above, this simply isn’t true. The website usage of people using IE6 is still significant enough to not ignore it. Again, this depends entirely on your industry, but if you are working in travel / tourism / holiday properties then you really ought to keep that in mind.

Myth 2 – Developing for IE6 is difficult

That entirely depends on what you are planning to do. I have yet to encounter a problem that I could not overcome for IE6. Some websites (such as www.visitpeakdistrict.com for example) have been built by colleagues and myself with no IE stylesheet at all! There are plenty of resources out there to aid you (one of my personal favourite ones being the definitive guide to taming IE6 by Jeff Starr) with developing for IE6, from flickering backgrounds to missing text (usually it is just a width or height-issue anyway), and jQuery and other plugins still work reasonably well for IE6 and degrade gracefully if not.

Myth 3 – IE6 is bad user experience

Whoever said this clearly does not have a grasp of what “user experience” actually means. As a piece of software IE6 “works” (else it would not have passed QA at Microsoft), it allows for bookmarking, browsing, searching, information gathering and even levels for customisation, which I believe is delivering a pretty good user experience.

The user experience this person was talking about is not defined by the browser, it is defined by the experience the website has to offer! It comes back to the points above – if you cannot code properly for IE6 then it is you who is causing this user experience issue.

Myth 4 – No one supports IE6

Wrong. Many support IE6 still to this day, web developers, software companies, and even the most crucial web techniques such as jQuery or Flash support IE6 (hell, Flash doesn’t even support a 64bit plugin properly!).

Myth 5 – it is easy to upgrade your browser

Just because it is easy for you to upgrade doesn’t mean it is for everyone. Put yourself into the position of an office employee working for a big company. This comes back to the history of IE6 I mentioned earlier, upgrading a browser is difficult because:

• The computer you are using may have a very old operating system
• You may not have administrator rights to do so
• You may not be able to justify why you need to have a new browser, and approval may take a long time in a bigger company
• You may not be able to justify the time and costs involved to upgrade all machines with a new browser, let alone a new operating system.
• Software on your machine you are using for day-to-day work may heavily rely on IE6
• You don’t know how to upgrade

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A lesson in history – when things went wrong (a case study)

A client of mine used this warning once. The result - over 2,000 complaings, 81% drop in traffic

About 2 years ago I was working with my team on a website for a relatively big UK travel company. Because the client wanted new functionality on certain product pages (interactive pricing grid and “add to basket facilities) they decided to make this available only to  certain newer browsers (against my company’s recommendation and to save development time), and set up an error message (see screenshot on the right) when visiting those new pages and asked us to monitor traffic in real-time for these pages and the whole of the website.

About 3h after putting these new pages (and this warning) up the CEO’s office rang to tell us that they received over 2,000 complaints about the new error message and had an over 80% drop in traffic and asked us to quickly take the new pages down and replace them with the old ones – and to plan in time to work on a cross-browser solution.

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Looking ahead

IE6 is sadly the only browser that will stay with us long after IE9 or maybe even IE10 has been released. Many companies cannot afford the time and money for purchasing new software licenses or changing operating systems because a lot is depending on their current set-up.

IE6 is a problem for many web developers, myself included, and many of us are spending hours, even days, making a website work properly across all browsers. What you need to think about is: who is your target audience, and what computer capabilities do they have? And are you willing to take the plunge and not support IE6 and lose X% in visits and potential custom?

How is your industry affected? Are you still supporting IE6?

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Last time I wrote about this Yahoo / Flash mashup I connected the Yahoo map’s API through Flash and PHP to a MySQL database and was able to write / read from the entries. My next goals were to integrate a user-login, adding links, implementing moderation and a Flash image uploader script.
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Integrating a PHP uploader script

A very important aspect for both users (and our clients) is to be able to ‘take part’ and ‘be part’ of shaping the user-generated content area of a site, to leave their mark. Naturally, images and content are the weapons of choice, as such the next step was to work on an image-uploader. The task:

Develop an image uploader script through Flash that would allow users to upload an image from their desktop, store it online in a writeable folder on the server and reference to it from the SQL database and display the image for the relevant post for the relevant user.

This wasn’t such an easy task. I had a good look around how Flash tutorial websites I usually frequent handle image upload. After some working I managed to get the PHP side of things working – which also had its own issues to start with, it would not update file names properly (see image to the right, click to enlarge)! After some fiddling around I managed to get the php script to work, and if you like you can download it here:

Please download the file here: fileupload.zip (~800 bytes)

What the script does is it defines the maximum file dimensions (180×300 max in either direction) and uploads the file to a temporary directory (/tempstore/) before giving it a timestamp and name-change and putting it into the /images/ directory.

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Connecting PHP with Flash

This was a bit (okay, a hell of a lot) more complicated: through the variables ‘FileReference‘ and ‘browseListener‘ and a couple of other event listeners I managed to tell Flash how to use the “Browse…” button and how to handle the uploaded image. At the moment the Flash file uploads the image to the database correctly, but it will break if the image does not have the correct size, so I need to work on getting the image-resizer to work. Once that works I’ll upload the source as well.

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Sneak Peak for the image-uploader (snapshot of 9th July 2008)

The main uploader:

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The uploaded image and adding information:

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…and the result:

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Conclusion and next steps

Well, so far it is looking very promising with the image-uploader! Obviously we are still some way to go with it, but I think the project is starting to take shape! Integrating browse and upload functionality in Flash took some work, but thanks to ActionScript 2.0′s event listeners it worked out reasonably well and connected to the database. Obviously we are still taking about only one user at a time, so I would need to review the php code at a later date to also make sure there is a folder structure per user present, but that should not be too much of an issue. Watch out for the next entry on this mash-up, by then I will have the uploader finished and maybe add the ability to upload multiple images to show a slideshow, we will see!

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Lastly, if you enjoyed the article – or just the flash map – then please leave a comment, I would really appreciate it, as it gives me always another boost to write more

What we would like is some sort of members-only application that allows our users to track their journeys with us and to maybe blog about them, but it should look swish and very easy to use. We would like a similar functionality for our travel guides who would then post information about the tours.

The idea of a blog is a great tool for customer retention, if done right it allows users to post comments about their journeys, maybe with images to keep a log of what they are doing while on that trip. It would allow visitors to see what is going on on a journey with <Company Name> and what you can do or what the user(s) saw and took part in. Obviously, I wanted to offer a little bit more than just a blog. My idea was to work on a map-blog…

(Please note, if you would just like to see the map in action, just scroll down to the bottom of this page)

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Integrating with new technologies

For (flash) designers and developers there are a number of new technologies that give a user access to content and functionality that was not possible a year or two back. Let us take Google or Yahoo for example: developers are given access to a great and increasing number of technological toys to play with: application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate content such as Flickr images and albums, mail, rss feeds or maps.

Anyone, from an individual to a development company, has access to these API components, and more and more people are using them to give their clients (or their portfolios) a WOW-factor.

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Travel blog + map = travel journal

Looking at the possibilities our CMS at work has (remember, its is aspx / .net) there was quite a range of possibilities we could offer our client something for the money. The obvious would have been setting up blog-facilities based on either each tour or destinations, giving registered users who have participated in a tour to blog and comment about it (we would run the user’s access against their booking history to grant write-rights). We could also set up forums and sub-forums to allow users to add comments about trips or destinations.

However, travel blogs or forum posts can be a bit text-laden, and the interaction only consists of a user posting, others reading and (if they like) commenting on posts.

Some time ago we did some Google Earth integration to one of our clients’ website which allowed the client to plot out tours on Google Earth, to give the user the ability to ‘see’ the tour and where it is going and what is going on. The idea of combining a map with a travel blog kinda became obvious.

With both Google Maps and Yahoo Maps giving excellent access to and support for their APIs I wanted to work on integrating a mapping solution with our user and blog-database. In the end I went for Yahoo Maps simply because their development network had a tremendous amount of information and code-snippets to get started with.

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Yahoo maps and ActionScript – (API) key to success?

Once the extension was downloaded and a API key registered I went on integrating the map into the workspace. Just import / drag the component into the stage. You can edit its size simply by entering a new width and height into the properties (by default on the bottom of the stage). Your next step will need to be to check out the parameters. The screenshot on the right (click to enlarge) shows you where you can find the API in Flash CS3 and what parameters you will need to change by default, such as API key, zoom factor or starting location (by default USA map).

Now that we have a working API-integration into flash I tackled the next step: integration of a server-database to read posted points as well as add points to it. (In this example I used PHP / MySQL as this blog is based on a PHP system). You need to set up a database via PHPMyAdmin for example. Here is a sql-database for you to have a look at and use:

Please download the file here: entries.zip

So, what do we have in this database now: We have an ID (unique value for each entry), lat and long, a date (for timestamping entries), a short info and a descritption. These are the fields I will be using for now.

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Writing to and from the Database

The next steps are to read from and enter information to the database through PHP. A simple

$sql = “INSERT INTO entries (id, lat, lon, date, info, description) VALUES (”, ‘$lat’, ‘$lon’, ‘$date’, ‘$info’, ‘$description’)”;

for entering information should do the trick. Which it did. I am not going into very much detail here, as the project is very code-heavy, but if you are interested in knowing more please do not hesitate to get in touch with me.

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The first travel journal test

Here is now a first map-test (please note that I have disabled entering notes at this stage):

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Closing comments and future plans for this project

Getting the API to work was a bit tricky, and it took me a couple of hours to figure out what could be done and what didn’t when it came down to connecting to a database.

• User-access: At the moment any user can access the map, as such I will need to work on a login-based system, with each login having their own database table, and maybe a selector at the start to see whose trip journal you would like to visit. This should hopefully not be too difficult *touch wood*.
• Image and video-upload: I will need to write an image upload script that saves the images on the server in the user’s folder and give each one a unique ID just in case. I’ll have to also look into resizing options and video compression if we are not using youtube etc
• Linking: Users should be able to cross-link or link to products / posts / etc
• Moderation & Administration: …and ideally all of the above should be moderated and maintained
• Plus, I want this to work in Adobe AIR later on as well, so I will need to rewrite a bit of the code later!

Lastly, if you enjoyed the article – or just the flash map – then please leave a comment, I would really appreciate it, as it gives me always another boost to write more

[UPDATE: I have updated this project's progress here]