Are you still supporting IE5.x?

Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

Are you still supporting IE5.x?

Time to cut it off?

ratman7

10:41 pm on Jan 10, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hi all,

Are you guys still testing to make sure your sites display correctly in IE5 and 5.5? It's going to be a while before we can send IE6 out to pasture, but I'm thinking it might be time to not worry about IE5 anymore. What do you all think?

encyclo

11:49 pm on Jan 10, 2008 (gmt 0)

What do your stats tell you? Do you have any IE5.x visitors left on your websites? In general terms, IE5.x (Windows) can be considered dead now, I don't test for it and haven't for quite a while.

ratman7

12:29 am on Jan 11, 2008 (gmt 0)

What do your stats tell you? Do you have any IE5.x visitors left on your websites?

On my sites, not really. My question is geared to sites created for clients. I'm curious to know when other developer's cutoff date was or is expected to be.

surrealillusions

11:36 am on Jan 11, 2008 (gmt 0)

I only started making websites in 2005..and so have never bothered with ie5.

So i guess my cutoff was in 2005 when i started

adwatson

4:11 pm on Jan 11, 2008 (gmt 0)

Well, our stats for this month show 0.08% of our visitors using IE 5.5 so I'm not worried that I don't support it :)

HelenDev

4:21 pm on Jan 11, 2008 (gmt 0)

I try and design for standards and I do have an additional stylesheet for both IE6 and IE5. I don't have the means to test IE5 any more, and don't lose any sleep over it, but I'm reasonably confident the site would be at least usable if not very pretty in IE5.

LunaC

4:52 pm on Jan 11, 2008 (gmt 0)

I still take a look at sites in IE5 to see if they're useable, just for curiosity sake really. There's no way I'm going to bother making sites look / work perfect for it at this point.

Even the thought of having to do that for IE6 for the next however long grinds at me >:(.

That said I do use alternate stylesheets for IE6 if I have to ([if lt IE 7]) so some browser bugs for 5 get corrected there even if only by accident in correcting for IE6. I won't go out of my way at all though for IE5.

mluddn

11:43 pm on Jan 11, 2008 (gmt 0)

I'm feeling just lucky if my site works well in IE 5.x, but I don't really feel depressed if not.

It is a question of site's usability for that percentage of visitors with IE 5.x.. But there is a question like this

"Do you optimize sites to 800x600"? (Don't answer to this one)

Xapti

7:03 am on Jan 12, 2008 (gmt 0)

If you can get it to look half decent in IE6 which is rather important, then while it's likely it will look different in IE5.5, it will still show the content, which is all that really matter if someone's using an old browser.
Ensuring this minimum compatibility (navigation and content still exists in some form, pretty hard to screw up) would be ideal, but it's most likely the case if it's already designed for IE6.

carsten888

8:33 am on Jan 12, 2008 (gmt 0)

I stopped testing/supporting for ie5 2 years ago.

g1smd

9:28 pm on Jan 13, 2008 (gmt 0)

I have a conditional CSS file with a few IE5 fixes in it that I still use, and one for IE6, and one for IE7. They're added to <head> in an include.

My main reference points are Valid HTML and CSS, and a visual test in Mozilla (Opera and Safari get a quick test too).

ratman7

10:40 pm on Jan 14, 2008 (gmt 0)

Great feedback here. Sounds like it IS time to forget about IE5.

techietone

4:52 pm on Jan 15, 2008 (gmt 0)

I have given up on IE5 a long time ago. Anyone still using that extrememly buggy browser deserves to be pushed into upgrading!

I was suprised at some of the online stats I see for IE 6 and how high usage still is although i suspect some of it is people that never install windows updates and some of it is specificly corperate holding back because in house applications don't work so well with IE7 as they have been design to get around the short coming's of IE 6

When i look at the stats for my sites I see that IE 6 usage is very low (infact I know the one person that uses IE 6 on my sites, its my wife from work who is still using Windows 2000 cos her company has never heard of Total cost of ownership!)

infact I don't think the company she works for has ever heard of Value for money to be honest

HelenDev

2:58 pm on Jan 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

The only person I know who still uses IE5 is my dad and he can't upgrade because he's running an ancient computer with Windows 98 and refuses point blank to purchase new hardware. Then he wonders why nothing works very well. Aargh!

Enough of my family problems, but I guess there must be a few others out there like him who account for those still on IE5.

With regard to the people who don't update Windows, I suspect that the reason for some of them might be that they are running dodgy copies.

g1smd

3:22 pm on Jan 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

You can still put Mozilla browsers on Windows 98 I believe.

That would be a huge improvement.