Browser Support or Browser Ignore?

I was asked recently by one of TerraCycle‘s major brand partners about some problems they were having in viewing the TerraCycle website. They were using Internet Explorer 7, and there were a few layout glitches. While I do intermittent checks for the TerraCycle website’s IE7 browser support, traffic using that browser makes up no more than 5% of our web traffic, and that’s a number that’s consistently falling. To my mind, IE7 is an obsolete browser, and while I’ll address any problems that make the site unusable, it’s not a high priority.

What was interesting was that the visitor from our brand partner initially wouldn’t believe this. She though that because she used IE7, and it was relatively standard at her company, then obviously it must be really common. Not only was it (quite reasonably) an issue for her personally, that also meant she believed it was a much more common issue than the statistics demonstrated.

I often use Google as a guideline

In general terms, the way Google evaluates which browsers are worth supporting is a good standard. Google provides a rolling level of support for the latest release version and the release version immediately prior to that. So when Microsoft released IE9, Google stopped actively supporting IE7 in its new web development. That seems a pretty solid logic to use (particularly in regards to Microsoft, which has a slower browser release schedule than the likes of Mozilla or Google itself).

I think there’s actually an imperative for web designers and developers to try and push this kind of standard. This is an area in which we have a responsibility to drive advancement. I know there’s always a lot of pressure from employers, clients or customers to support the widest possible spread of browsers. Although there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, there comes a point where;

• You’re putting in a lot of extra work for a very small fraction of potential users
• Supporting obsolete technology means that you can’t provide the best possible experience for those using current browsers

Explain the many good reasons for lack of support

When I explained the general usage statistics, and also how companies like Google weren’t supporting IE7, our brand partner understood the logic behind my decision to provide no more than the most limited support for IE7 on TerraCycle’s site. I needed to provide that statistical information though, and demonstrate to her that I was talking from a business standpoint as much as a “geeky tech guy who just wants to use the latest technology” perspective!

The campaign for web designers over the last few years has always been to eliminate support for IE6, which is now over a decade old. That’s largely been achieved, but having achieved that, the attention on the limitations of IE7 seems to be lacking. Yet IE7 is six years old next year. More importantly, with Microsoft having released two subsequent versions, it has limited usage (about 7% worldwide, obviously variable depending on a website’s audience). That’s a legitimate reason to make support at least a low priority, if not eliminate it altogether. The important thing is to provide a good business logic for doing so, and to explain that clearly.

There’s an elephant in the room (…for me, anyway)

When I’m designing on Shiny Toy Robots I don’t even think about IE7. I’m relatively confident that IE8 and onward will pretty solidly support my coding. For TerraCycle I take IE7 somewhat into account, but it’s a very low priority issue.

…yet I predict that in the next year or two, TerraCycle is going to move into China. Internet Explorer is king in China, other browsers have barely any market share at all. What’s worse, IE6 still makes up nearly 40% of their browser market. That’s when “obsolete” might be true from a technical standpoint, but isn’t from a business one. It’s an issue I’m going to have to address, and try and work out a solution for. I know that we’ll need to offer IE6 support, but I don’t want to limit the strong user experience on TerraCycle’s websites in general in order to incorporate obsolete technology into our current structure.

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