Comments on: Should Designers Charge More For Old Browser Support?

By: philipbeel

philipbeel — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:28:39 +0000

some really fascinating statistics here. Im thinking of maybe witting a more focused article about this, if you guys are interested in participating that would be great!

By: Justin

Justin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:51:28 +0000

@Kelkyron This is a site geared toward developers; truest me, Firefox doesn’t have a 44% market share in the real world. (Our site only sees less than 20% FF usage and over 65% IE.)

Our organization has found that compatibility in IE7+, FF1+, Safari 2+, and Chrome 1+ is pretty simple to keep and accounts for most of our traffic. As long as you’re running in standards mode in IE, there are very few bugs to fix.

Unfortunately, we still have about 17% of our IE users running IE6, so we’re forced to preserve basic support for them. Using IE conditional comments, that really isn’t too hard–although it does get old fixing PNGs and worrying about layout issues as you code.

We’ll most likely add a ribbon to our site soon encouraging users to upgrade, much like YouTube and other sites have . . . and once the percentage of IE6 users is trending lower, we’ll drop all but the most basic support for it.

The most unfortunate thing about IE6 is that so many companies have IT policies that don’t allow their users to upgrade. This is a real consideration you must take into account when you’re working in the business world: as of May of this year, 60% of medium to large corporations were forcing IE6. If you work with other businesses, IE6 support is a must. A sick, ugly must.

As for my personal work, I wouldn’t feel comfortable charging extra for this basic support. While I completely agree that a website shouldn’t be “viewable by any means”, I also have a strong belief that my clients are paying me to build a website that works/functions/renders in the browsers that both they and their mother-in-law have installed. Right now, that includes IE6.

If you’re spending a lot of time on this type of compatibility, then increase your BASE rate–don’t tack in on as an additional cost. Your client would rather pay for the Ferrari than pay to upgrade the Yugo, even though they’re ignorant to the differences under the hood.

And why should they understand . . . isn’t that why they hired you?

By: Chris M

Chris M — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:53:06 +0000

One of our corp sites pulls in a few hundred K uniques a month and 84% are IE (mostly IE7, 18% IE6)

By: Derek Pennycuff

Derek Pennycuff — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:31:49 +0000

Just wanted to let you know after I cut and pasted my response to this entry into Blogger, I got slammed with real work and it sat in draft mode for the past month. I finally got around to actually publishing it today.

By: Derek Pennycuff

Derek Pennycuff — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:30:04 +0000

i think the key is to explain it to clients as a return on investment. it’s pretty easy to ensure basic functionality on anything from lynx up to modern browsers. but trying to get every rounded corner and ever enhanced feature to work in netscape 4 or IE5 (or even IE6) requires a lot more code and a lot more work. that costs more to build today and it costs more to maintain forever.

ok, my comment just got longer than your original post. i think i’ll turn it into a blog entry of my own.

By: Kelkyron

Kelkyron — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:58:48 +0000

I agree that there should be an extra charge for old browser support…nowadays the most common browser according to [http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp] is Firefox at 44%, IE7 at 26% IE6 at 20%. The point is the percentage for older browser is really small…but if it is a big project…i think the cost of that project can compensate for the time spent developing the site for older browser compatibility..