Game over for IE5.x

Time to drop support?

[encyclo]

With IE7 just around the corner, I've been going through my sites which are built with tableless designs, and have been ripping out any hacks with relate to IE5.x - in particular the voice-family or Tantek box model hack, which I use for setting box widths as well as font sizes (I prefer using keywords for font sizes, which IE5.x treats incorrectly).

However, having perused a lot of stats for various sites, I'm on the verge of dropping IE5.x support altogether accross the board. I don't want to test for three generations of IE, and the user numbers for IE5.x are on the cusp of being low enough to let the remaining users put up with wrongly-sized boxes and over-sized fonts.

I was wondering where anyone else was in terms of IE5.x support. Still too early to abandon IE5.x completely, or are you already way ahead of me?

[tedster]

I'm with you in spirirt, but I think it's premature for me to try to kiss off IE 5 support. I'm still seeing anywhere from 7% to 12% across many sites and there no telling exactly when IE7 will hit the mainstream -- or if those using IE5 will show anything like a migration.

If it's only going to mean some aesthetic differences, such as incorrect margins and unwanted horizontal scrollbars, then it's a good thing. But for at least another year or two, I plan on ensuring a graceful degrade for IE5 users. IE5.2 on Mac is a big concern for me -- as long as there are substantial OS9 users, that particular browser will be with us, and Microsoft has no further plans to support Macintosh OS with a browser, afaik.

[Robin_reala]

We still support IE5.5. Annoyingly IE5.0 has more users (because IE5.5 was never a pre-installed version?) but at the end of the day it's that much worse than 5.5 that it starts becoming a pain to debug. We generally make sure things look perfect in 6.0, acceptable in 5.5, and functional in 5.0.

Personally I'd like not to even bother testing in it, but you'd be surprised how many clients still use it - it was the default install in Win2K.

[tedster]

Old AOL browsers tend to hand in there rather tenaciously, too -- and I believe AOL 6 was essentially IE 5

[2by4]

I never upgraded to IE 6 on my main box, have it elsewhere for testing, but I prefer IE 5.5, I've found that is often more solid than IE 6 for some more advanced CSS stuff I've used, as long as you use box model hacks, but I've found ways around most of those too, minimum ie conditionals etc.

For me there's almost no difference between supporting IE 5.x and 6, so it's never really been a question, the question to me was dropping IE 4, which is now happily more rare by far than NS 4.

Over the years I've basically just accepted the limitations re CSS that exist, and code within them, that means my stuff almost always works on almost all browsers, less headache that way, Safari was pretty bad in its first version, and I keep finding new Opera bugs, so if it works on IE 5x, it's fine with me, and more importantly, it's fine with almost all visitors of my sites.

<added>Just checked the stats on two largish blandly commercial sites, 5% of IE users use an IE less than 6.

I tend to maintain support until it drops down below 1%, so whenever that happens I might finally upgrade my main IE to 6, not that I particularly want 6 on my box, but guess I'll have to do it, or run crossover office and IE 6, no choice then.

Checked 3 month stats for another blandly commercial site, IE 5x there runs almost 9%, so no, IE 5 support isn't going anywhere.