should we still support IE5.0 ?

[DoubleV]

We are totally redoing our web site and the eternal question of browser support came up. I am trying to push for IE5.5 and up NS6 and up (other older browsers will be directed to a pge asking them to download a web standards compliant browser). It seemed like the IT guy in the UK branch of our company agreed as well.

So I built a template as xhtml transitional, no tables at all, divs and styles – w3c validated. He replied back after quite some time saying that it doesn’t show up right on his boss’s computer. I asked what browser the boss has and it is IE5.0. The UK guy said he’ll “explore on this end” and let me know (meaning he’ll explore this end how we can modify the code), but he never did. I said that it is time for an upgrade. As far as I can remember, IE5.0 is from 1999 and we all know how web changed since then.

Now the UK marketing management is furious. As I found out this Friday, the entire UK office is still using 5.0 and “they have no problems viewing any other site” but mine. Their claim is that even though version 6 is available, not everybody has it.

I am trying to say that technology is moving forward and I wrote code that is web standards compliant, but not sure how convincing it is. My pages are also shorter because I don’t have the ridiculous amount of nested tables all over, so I say – they load quicker. From your experience, would you say that having standards compliant code saved you development time?

We don’t care about the UK users – they should not end up on our site to begin with (there’s always a “select your country” page that directs to appropriate web site), but we got to have our own sister company be able to view our site.

The biggest argument I can come up with for supporting IE5.0 is that Win2000 comes with it and many people have that OS. But is that enough?

What are your thoughts? Should I stop being “cool” with the web standards deal and support IE5.0? If we never stop supporting - peopel will never upgrade, but on the other hand we don't want to be turning the customers away.

[oracleguy]

I had to deal with this when I redesigned a site at work and used a CSS based layout.

I decided it would be worth it in the long run to only support 5.5 and higher. Using a CSS based layout has so many positive aspects you can't it ignore it.

It may not save development time... this time around. But lets say in a year or whatever you want to change the look of the site? You edit your style sheets and boom! You got yourself a brand new site with minimal or no changes to any of the pages. That was the key factor in my decision to drop IE5 support.

Another reason (and it should be a very important one for them) to upgrade their browser is for security. Mircosoft doesn't release security fixes for IE5 anymore.

Like you said, if you never stop supporting something, no one has any motivation to upgrade.

[DoubleV]

I decided it would be worth it in the long run to only support 5.5 and higher.
this is what i decided as well. It's not like we're dropping ALL support to anything that is not the latest and greatest, but where do we stop???
Using a CSS based layout has so many positive aspects you can't ignore it.
can you nake a list? whatever you can come up with. i need arguments. ;)
Another reason (and it should be a very important one for them) to upgrade their browser is for security. Mircosoft doesn't release security fixes for IE5 anymore.
excellent point!

[DoubleV]

but then what do i say to their argument that they can see any site but mine?

[brothercake]

I think you should still try to support 5.0 - check out the google stats - http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html and that's quite a lot of people, particularly when you include Mac IE5 as well, which is still the majority of mac users .. although probably not for much longer.

5.0 is poor I know ... but it's not like it's netscape 4 .. what is it you're trying to do that doesn't work or you can't degrade? And remember that you have Win/IE5 conditional comments you can use to feed tweaks or corrections just for that browser.

[DoubleV]

brothercacke,
ie5.0 onmac actually displays my xhtml pages without problems! i am talking about pc.

[brothercake]

Yeah mac/ie5 is much better :)

But I recently made a Strict XHTML site and it works (almost) perfectly in Win IE5.0 - http://www.morimarketdynamics.com/

What is it you wanna do that doesn't work?

[DoubleV]

i don't have 5.0 (only 5.5) and theUK guy never bothered to send me a screen shot.
the test site (still at thendevelopment stage) is at http://nimlok.com/new_site/final/

[oracleguy]

Originally posted by DoubleV
but then what do i say to their argument that they can see any site but mine?

Thats an invalid point. They can see any of the sites they go to normally. And how do they know they are seeing it correctly. With IE5 it might be just slightly off but they wouldn't know unless they looked at it in a new browser. I'm sure you could find lots of sites that use CSS based layouts that they couldn't see.

Positive reasons for a CSS layout:

The seperation of content and style makes it easier for less web litterate people to edit the pages
It makes layout changes easy, there is no need to edit any of the actual pages
Using CSS versus nested tables reduces the ammount of code in the pages and improve response times.
Relating to the previous point, if less data needs to be sent to the client for a page view, it frees up server resources and you can get more page views per GB of data transfer per month
The web is going in that direction and CSS layouts is the future.


Thats all I could think of right off the top of my head. Perhaps others can think of more.

[oracleguy]

I did end up seeing what my site that I created without IE5 support looked like on IE5 accidently. My boss had IE5 on his laptop and didn't realize it until he tried to view the site during a staff meeting. :)

The only problems I noticed were minor. It look slightly weird but it was still perfectly usable. There were some things with some of the margins and some other tags. I didn't bother fixing them though.

If you want to see what it looks like in IE5, you could try www.browsercam.com

[brothercake]

Yeah the most blatant difference is the box model - IE5 is always in 'quirks mode', as it were. But the way round that is not to use padding on containers - use margins on the inner elements, then box model discrepancies don't arise so easily.

But it looks okay to me; the scrolling DIV even works :)

http://www.brothercake.com/cf/nimlock_screenshot1.gif
http://www.brothercake.com/cf/nimlock_screenshot2.gif

[DoubleV]

Originally posted by brothercake
Looks okay to me; the scrolling DIV even works :)
what browser version?

[DoubleV]

i came home, uninstalled my ie and it restored to default, which is 5.00.3502.1000 on w2k.
looked at the site - shows up almost perfect.
brothercake, what os and ie version do you have?
i don't think th uk guys are lying, but then ... may be they use a different os. dunno. i'm gonna start another thread asking people with 5.0 to take a look.

[brothercake]

it's 5.00.2920.0000 also on win2k; I have ie5.0 on win98 I can look at if you want?

[DoubleV]

Originally posted by brothercake
I have ie5.0 on win98 I can look at if you want?
that would be great if you could do that!

[Roy Sinclair]

While it seems your site is actually OK in IE 5.0 I'd like to offer some thoughts on why you might want to support it though I'd like to blast MS first for making it impossible to test web sites against various versions of IE without maintaining extra machines or OSes.

One major change MS added to IE after IE 5.01 (SP1) was to disable the handling of Netscape style plugins. With that change they broke a number of plugins that people were using and also doomed users who couldn't afford updated plugins but who trul need their plugins to staying with the obsolete version of IE.