ie 4.0

Do you still support it?

[hartlandcat]

There's been a lot of fuss and stress about whether people support Netscape 4 or not. I find that more people on my site use IE 4 than Netscape 4, so I was wondering whether other people support IE 4.

P.S. why have my "IE" come out in lower case on the title?

[jbinbpt]

It's tough to test in all versions. I personally have the current releases of Netscape, Opera and IE on the development workstation. I test in those. Once I upload, I check from one of the home machines, which has IE 5. Thats as much as I can do. I believe that if users could upgrade they would. They understand the limitations of their systems. If I was on dialup, I would hesitiate to load all the service packs and upgrades.
jb

[Ryan8720]

No, most of my sites are CSS-P. They won't look good, so I add a display: none; image that shows on CSS incompatible browsers and explains to the user that their browser is old.

[txbakers]

no, I don't support IE 4.

[Filipe]

Ideally I would support them, but the overhead effort and time involved is... well, basically I'm willing to alienate a significant number of users for being behind the game. Get with the program!

Heh, get with the program. I kill me.

However, I do fully support most current popular browsers (IE, Netscape, Opera, and Firebird) and I recommend other webmasters do the same.

[korkus2000]

For me since IE is upgraded with OS upgrades, I don't worry about versions before 5. They have so many problems that need patches and upgrades, Microsoft really tries to upgrade the browser then patch it. I do however try and let my site degrade gracefully, if possible.

I think it is an audience issue. How many are using 4. If it is a noticable amount I would make the site work for it. You could always have a plain site for older browsers, screen readers and text browsers if you see enough visitors to justify it. I try to let the visitors stats make me go beyond IE 5+, Netscape 4+, Opera 5+, mozilla, and the other hodgepodge of open source like firebird, safari, and konquerer.

[SMXwebcrawler]

hodgepodge - konquerer

In ym opinion this is the best browser I have used and what is hodgepodge..!

[korkus2000]

I should have phrased that better. I just mean there are so many of those type browsers I don't even know them all. It was not meant as a derogatory comment about them. I see them gaining speed, so I would assume they are nice. I just never use them except to test.

[choster]

We have a fairly large number of users still on Windows 95, so we still support IE4. Many of these are, for example, small town governments in which technology upgrades are not a budget priority, either because computers are not used heavily or because they cannot afford to make it one. (We also have a rapidly declining but still significant number of NN4 users).

However, we are doing research on the extent employees are running more sophisticated/modern systems at home. None of our Javascript or CSS depends on the latest and greatest right now, but of course what was latest and greatest a year ago is becoming more mainstream day by day.

Your mileage may vary.

[hartlandcat]

I get about 2% IE 4.0 users, and most of them are Windows 98 users that never bothered to upgrade from the browser that came with their computer.

[BlueSky]

Some may have stayed with Win 95 and 98 due to budgets but others did it because they have had no need to upgrade or for security concerns. Face it, every time you turn around Microsoft has another security patch out.

I don't support IE 4.0. There has to be a cut off somewhere. Obviously that depends on each site's visitors. For me, people using that dinosaur are around 0%. One thing I've noticed is IE 5 & 6 browsers dropped from above 90% for me down to less than 80%. Don't know if this is anomaly or Microsoft is starting to lose marketshare.