Should We Support Older Browsers?

[Deverill]

This started as a helpful comment in another thread and I wanted to bring this part of it to the html/css section for your opinions.

 

I have a website I reorganized and added CSS-Positioning to keep it managable. The problem is that in IE5.5 and NS4.7 it basically goes nuts.

 

My question is how much does it really matter about the older browsers? I can't even download IE5.5 from Microsoft to see how it looks. The same seems to be true of NS for any version prior to 7.1.

 

Does anyone know of any emperical studies of how many "real people" use these older browsers? How much does the spread of DSL and cable modems in homes impact this for the immediate and near future?

 

I don't just want to say "If you don't have the latest - tough!" but I don't want to waste a lot of time and lose the capabilities of CSS-P for a tiny handfull of folks.

 

Of course, the obvious "next question" is "How far back do I go?" IE5.5, 5.01, 5.0, NS4, further?

 

On my site's hits I can account for about 86% of the hits being the most modern version... then there are the bots at a small percentage on top of that. Another consideration may be "Does the type of my site dictate the 'acceptable loss' percentage?" Especially for things that can't directly translate to lost sales such as a church or rental property.

 

What do you think?

[TCH-Rob]

I spent 6 years doing tech support for a few ISP's. In that time I can say a majority of our "normal" users did not have the latest browser. Most could not upgrade if they knew how. I would venture to say that one should shoot for IE 5.0 at the least. I say this as 72% come from IE6 on my site. As my site gets more popular, that may decline. In my case I am trying to get customers so it is most important to serve as many as possible.

 

WHen working in the Registrar/hosting field I did notice many of those working on NPO or church sites didnt do as many upgrades other users and were running older software.

 

This is going to be a judgement call really. My answer, appeal to as many as possible. As a computer junkie I say upgrade or fade away.

[Wilexa]

Jim...

 

I started this thread a while ago on basically the same subject.

 

Unfortunately (for me), the percentage of Netscape 4 users visiting my site hasn't dropped, despite some not-so-subtle encouragement to use something newer.

 

I stuck with a tabled layout for the main stuff and have a CSS-P version of the site in an experimental stage, dreaming of the day when it take over the spotlight.

 

Generally speaking, though, most users I know won't come back if a site looks terrible in the first browser they see it with.

 

So, each webmaster has to ask himself or herself: "How many visitors do I want to never come back?" That, of course, should be balanced with "How many visitors will come back over and over if the site really rocks with a reasonable browser?"

 

I know, I know. No answers, just a lot of words!

 

 

...Dave

 

 

 

 

Rock Sign

[TCH-Don]

Good topic!

I started playing with css and tableless designs,

and I too was shocked to see how bad it looked in NS4.x

I still see a few NS visitors so I will stick to table designs for my pet site for now.

 

But how many of you support no frame browsers?

I know they are old too, but I see a lot of framed sites with

"your browser does not support frames" in the ,<no frame>. tag.

Am I the only one to have the whole page duplicated inside the no frame tags?

I can't remember which browser version started with frames,

I think IE3?

[TCH-JimE]

Hi,

 

The problem is NS4 has naff all support for CSS, let alone positioning etc. If you want to download any netscape browser, even back to NS 2.0 (dont laugh!) then go here: http://www.netscape.co.jp/download/archive.html

 

When it comes to IE, I program for anything about IE 5.5 Yes I could spend a few hours doing it for IE 5.0 and warn people that sites may not be as accessible or good looking in lower browsers.

 

Bugman

[borfast]

I just had enough with IE and it's stupid CSS support. I started working with CSS on Mozilla and when I tried making my CSS-enabled webpages to work on IE, I almost went nuts! SO I just gave up.

My new website (on the works on my computer) will work on standards compliant browsers. Anything other than that won't be guaranteed to work. And I know that IE users will have a rough time on my website but I'm not going to waste my time and energy fixing my website for a browser whose creators didn't spend time and energy on to make it work with my website...

 

I know this will make me lose visitors but it will also open up the minds of a few people. If I can get 1 person out of 10 to drop IE, even if I lose the other 9 visitors, I'll consider it a victory.

 

OK, enough ranting, on to the question.

 

I think you should analyze the percentage of visitors who use older browsers and then see if it's worth the time and energy of fixing your site to work with those browsers.

Of course it also depends on how many visitors you want to keep. If every single visitor is vital to your website, then you obviously need to make your site work on every browser. But if your audience is composed mainly by computer literate fellows, perhaps it's not such a problem if you won't go any further back than IE5.5, Opera 6 and Gecko 1 (NS6/7, Mozilla).

[Deverill]

Great discussion guys.

 

I didn't say it in the original message but in my particular case I have an end-user that wants everything to look slick and nice with frequent updates. In the case of the church website I suppose the correct answer is that we want to lose zero folks - the website should reflect the quality of the church and to some it will look like we're fools.

 

I guess the only alternative for now is to go back to tables and do a lot of extra work to move things around - but the PHP includes definitely helps even with tables!

 

Thanks for the input!

[Wilexa]

Just one quick note ---

 

Three sites I have found really useful for Netscape-compatible (NN4) CSS are:

 

http://www.realworldstyle.com ,

http://www.saila.com/usage/layouts/ , and

http://www.fu2k.org/alex/css/

 

...Dave