Fast Lane!

I have never heard of any of these to be honest. Yahoo.com, MSN.com, MSNBC.com, cnn.com, digg.com, facebook.com, slashdot.org, foxnews.com, myspace.com, etc... all support IE6 and I doubt that will change soon.

NBC: http://boards.nbc.com/nbc/index.php?act=idx Nvidia: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?act=idx For NBC, this is the stock 2.x skin with a simple bit of html in the wrapper around it to "integrate it" into the rest of the site. For Nvidia it is nearly stock entirely. If they did this with IPB 3.x it would have the problems I discussed with IE6.

I agree with you on this and if I could force them to upgrade that would be ideal. However to think that one website (of the many my members visit each day) would have the power to force them to upgrade is a stretch. Most people would find it easier just to go to another site if the one they are visiting suddenly does not work well. If LOTS of sites suddenly did not work then maybe they would upgrade. I think that most sites still support IE6 and it seems a little quick for IPB which is the backbone of many websites to be on the leading edge of the transition. If anything I would thinking waiting until the EOL date would be appropriate.

I agree but this does not cover getting feedback from guest users (probably a 2 or 3:1 ratio on most sites (to registered users)) and it does not cover new users down the road. Even if you got all current registered members to swap it would still be an issue. I do understand you point also. For small sites it is easier to get everyone moved to a new browser if needed. When you have tens of thousands or more members it is another story all together. For larger sites this is an issue and I feel like IPB is not considering customers in this situation. I am sure their corporate and larger customers such as NBC and others who use IPB will take ill to this decision.

So I get all these items and even now I would promote this (even with an IE6 supported skin). That said, would you be willing to lose $$ and market share over this issue? I know I am not. These new fancy features we get are just not worth it (and users really care about content and that the site has a general ease of use and basic features).

Well anything I run is free to the user and funded by other means. I can not charge people less than free :). In general, people are lazy. They will often just go to another website than figure out how to download a newer browser. There is that thing about page load time and if it is more than 3-5 seconds you will lose visitors -- and it is true. Additionally to those who just wont upgrade, there are those that can not (many many businesses and government offices) which end up being a large number of people during the work day.

I do see your point. But tell me this. If you consider your website as a business and every visitor a paying customer, would you tell 23% of your customers that they get a "lesser" version of the site? Would you want to risk losing that income just to have a standards compliant skin? I could see doing this for 5% or less maybe. Personally when a decision like this threatens to hurt my pocket book in terms of $ (turning off potentially 23% of users to a competing site potentially) then I am pretty concerned. So a little math. Lets say you make $1000 a month from your website. Now lets say 25% of them are using IE6. Lets say that a third of that 25% decide they want to leave because of this. That means that you will be losing roughly 8% of your userbase NET and losing $80 a month or $960 a year. This is a low estimate because of the referral nature of forums and websites and that you have that many less people talking about your site and referring others.

That solution bothers me though. That is like telling me that 23% of my members will get a lower quality version of my site. They will also not get the same user experience as other people (which from a branding perspective is bad). Additionally it increases my workload supporting two skins and tech support for people on both. Also the "bare skin" would probably not work as the primary skin for me as I have to "integrate" it with the main website skin which then takes away the purpose of it being the "light" skin.

I know this has been talked about before but IE6 will not be fully supported in IPB 3.x. As of today IPB 3.x renders unusable in many circumstances on IE6 however Charles and other IPB Staff indicate that it will be supported better (but not fully) in the final release. My question is this. Will it be possible to utilize all the new IPB 3.x features without IE6 native support? Would it require a complex (and costly) 3rd party skin to obtain this and if so would this lead to compatibility and other problems with future upgrades? What are people's thoughts? As of today it was published that IE6 globally still has a 23% market share (http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/03/04/firefox.overtakes.ie6/), which is a HUGE portion of potential users that would be affected by this. My sites have about a 15% IE6 user base based on my statistics and even that number is high enough for me to be concerned about them. My personal opinion is that despite the urge to move forward to a more standards compliant skin, supporting IE6 is still an evil that we have to deal with. No matter how much we want, many people are not upgrading any time soon. Sites like Digg.com which is very web 2.0'ish even support IE6. Basically, what are people's plan to overcome this issue? Please do not simply post "tell my users to upgrade to IE7/8/firefox". This is not the question and not realistic. I am NOT going to have a major website say, "Best if browsed with IE7 or higher, Firefox, etc".