To hell with IE6? More like to hell with “good enough”
Lately a lot of bloggers have started venting their frustration on IE6 - Robert Nyman got the ball rollling, Roger Johannson enforced the argument and now Ara Pehlivanian chimes in. The general consensus is that people should stop making things work pixel-perfect for IE6 at the cost of delaying projects or adding cruft to the code. This brings on fond memories of Jeffrey Zeldman’s To Hell With Bad Browsers and WaSP’s browser upgrade campaign which was great (although I always considered the javelin thrower a bit creepy) but like then it makes you wonder who we are talking to with these campaigns.
As I pointed out in my comment on Ara’s post I thoroughly support the sentiment but consider it misguided:
As much as I would love to see IE6 being taken out into the garden and beaten by kids with sticks before being set on fire, I’d say there is a lot of fallacy in the argument that we as web developers have much say in the matter. Of course users have the choice to use any other browser, but the sad fact is that IE6 prevails in environments where users don’t have the option to upgrade their browser as IT defines what software is on the computer. These are the same companies that block Facebook and Flickr as it distracts people from “doing real work”.
The “good enough” syndrome
Actually this to me is a symptom of a bigger cause, one that I call the “good enough” syndrome. That’s the thing that keeps us from improving a lot of working environments: people are happy to use a half-baked solution that doesn’t require any additional work instead of keeping their setup up-to-date.
Not everybody is as enthusiastic about IT as we are and in most cases computers are a tool to reach a goal. That is the same for us but in a lot of cases the users simply don’t want to be bored with details. Instead they just want to use the damn thing.
It doesn’t matter how convoluted and braindead a process to get where they need to get is – once learned, this is the way to go and it is easy to repeat this every time it has to be done. Learning an easier way or trying out a different technology is extra work and seems superfluous – the time for the braindead task is already allocated and there is no point in shifting the interaction with that computer thing around.
Paper trail conditioning
You get the same happenings in companies and when it comes to paperwork. A lot of steps in internal processes or in ordering forms are completely redundant – ludicrous even. But as they are the way that things have to be done and questioning them means more work and “rocking the boat” we stick to them. There must be a reason for them, after all, right? We don’t work with idiots, there must be some good reason for all these redundant steps. We could ask for those reasons but that is too much work – after all we need this time to follow all these steps that have to be done, right?
Keeping the saw blunt – computers don’t evolve, right?
As computers are magical and too hard to understand there is also not much sense in questioning the status quo: whatever they use at work must be the best thing there is as we work with professionals. As geeks we like to push the boundaries of our toys and use them for all kind of cool things. Most of all we like to tinker with the toy itself which gets us far too close to the subject matter. A lot of of other users out there however see it as a tool to either get work done or to be entertained.
My favourite example is my brother: he wanted a computer to do some graphical work, to write reports for his job and to play games. Having these three tasks of course he needed a Windows machine as all his colleagues had one and can lend him games to try out. He also spends most of his time trying out new virus scanning tools and firewalls as all his colleagues tell him about all the evil viruses out there. Last time I checked his machine there were 3 virus scanners and 2 firewalls running and he wondered why the computer is so slow and why he needed yet another video card to run a new game. I bought him a Wii and introduced him to Macs and Linux, but that’s not on as the latter two don’t run games and there is no Word for it.
All in all the setup is “good enough” as he is not a professional and it allows him to do what he wants to do. That there are easier and better ways out there is neither here nor there, it took long enough to get the hang of it and other things will be harder to learn, after all everybody uses this setup and is protected by Virus scanners – it has to be the right one. That many people cannot be wrong.
The good enough syndrome manifests itself in a milder form of Stockholm Syndrome where people start defending the terrible solutions and complex processes with claws and teeth instead of keeping an open mind and trying out something new. Want an example in our world? Table layouts vs. CSS layouts :)
Tags: ie6, improvement, keepingthesawblunt, process, upgrading, workenvironments
February 13th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Totally agree with your assessment of the situation and I guess you agree that something does have to give?
I think you’re right in what you have said and found you’re point about the German market in Ara’s blog an interesting one.
I think it should be made clear to the user that their experience of a site is going to be hindered by the fact that they’re using an out-dated browser such as IE6. I think what you were saying about the German users was they responded when they were told that unless they upgraded they were at risk if not guaranteed of computer problems, a much greater motivating factor than the chance a border would be square instead of round on content box.
You mentioned your brother and how he thought that it was possible he needed a new video-card to play some of the latest games. Isn’t that the situation we should be aiming at? Educating users about their browsing experience in a similar way the game industry does about the player’s gaming experience?
Last time I visited Facebook it made it clear that if I intended to use its site with IE6 that I could encounter problems and have a degraded experience of Facebook, it suggested Firefox or similar browsers. Which is very much the same way a video game makes it clear that if you’re using an old machine/video-card that you most likely wont get the intended experience. I realise there is a distinct difference between gaming and browsing the web and the accessibility issues, etc but I think that so long as the site the developer has created is accessible which its likely to be if its progressively enhanced and so on, then I think we should make it clear to clients and end users that the site will not be the intended experience they could get if they upgraded or changed their browser and more importantly that they were at risk of viruses and spyware by continuing to user IE6.
February 13th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
There is a problem here, many people don’t know what browser they are using, they are just not interested so they continue to use the browser that came with their computer. Is it really fair to get on their case? Why is “good enough” not good enough? Life is full of compromises, my trip to work on the bus is “good enough”, there are much better ways of getting into town but the bus is okay.
IE6 usage should not be any problem, as Paul mentioned, if your coding using progress enhancement your site will work without JavaScript, you don’t need to enable anything that doesn’t work on IE6. IE6 users may get standard links and clunky behaviour but after all, that is ‘good enough’. Using conditional comments to add an IE6 style sheet to tidy up the UI and you have “good enough” IE6 support. Users with a recent browser will get the AJAX, transitions and all the sexy stuff you have spent time developing.
February 13th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
This can als be turned to work in our favor, and is in fact my evolving strategy for getting captions to happen here on The Farm (* those that know, know). This kind of institutional inertia is not always bad if properly harnessed, but it’s the harnessing that is the tricky bit.
That said – death to IE 6!
February 14th, 2009 at 3:59 am
On a site I just launched ( http://www.shair.it/ ) I did a tiny bit of legwork to make sure it rendered “OKish” in IE6 and then I added a little header strip for people using IE6 which said: “You appear to be using Internet Explorer 6 to view this site. We warn you that this will provide you with a degraded experience and recommend you update to a better or at least a newer browser.” (better linking to Firefox and newer linking to IE7). I think this is fair – at least no-one can complain that the site doesn’t quite look right…
Your other points reminded me of this article where the author goes to pains to stress the benefits of going beyond “good enough” and automating all you can: http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/cycle-eaters/
February 14th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Christian, your usual clarity and directness seem to have deserted you here (which is excusable as this is a big, muddy issue). It’s not entirely clear what you’re arguing for. I think you’re saying that we need to make the user experience in IE6 much better, so much better that IT departments want to upgrade so they can have even more cool stuff, features and nice design. If so, that sounds like quite a remote possibility.
I’ve written a much longer piece about this here: http://www.paulcarvill.com/2009/02/youll-miss-me-when-im-gone-ie6-cross-browser-consistency-and-device-independence/
Basically, I argue that we need to simplify what the hell we’re all trying to do. It’s the web, fer chrissakes, not a magazine layout or a video game. Let’s stick to what we do well — show text and pictures in a linear fashion on a page. Easy, works everywhere. And I’m not negating designer’s work, they love working within constraints anyway.
February 14th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
@Paul, yeah I might have packed a bit too much in there. I agree with you and my own point about the IE6 issue in a nutshell is to not grace it with extra funky fixes but make it work for it as basically as possible. I’ve come to realize that the real IE6 users a so used to bad experiences it doesn’t make sense to put as much effort as we should put into making our things work in modern browsers. As to simplicity being good, look at what I am doing with this blog :)
February 16th, 2009 at 12:33 am
“but the sad fact is that IE6 prevails in environments where users don’t have the option to upgrade their browser as IT defines what software is on the computer. These are the same companies that block Facebook and Flickr as it distracts people from “doing real work”.”
Just to note that in my experience the users “doing real work” can be using in house systems delivered via a browser and built years ago that work perfectly on IE6. Upgrading to IE7 causes problems for these applications and the ‘company’ doesn’t care about external sites not working because that isn’t what is making them money. Keeping IE6 (for the time being) is a reasonable thing to do to protect the business.
I understand this isn’t really the argument you are making in this post – just felt the need to argue for “The Man” (I occasionally argue on IE’s behalf too ;) )
February 16th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Yeah, especially considering many of them don’t know what a browser is, and they’re stuck with IE6 because it’s company policy. I’ve dumbed down my site three or four years ago to accomodate those, by telling them as an intro in a (convenient) “if lt ie6″ comment that I know that’s what they’re using, and sorry but I won’t spend more time fixing it to be pixel-perfect. I’m using stuff like semi-transparent png and tricky relative positioning, and didn’t think it was worth adding fixes and workarounds for a market that is dwindling.
And my colleagues, three years down the road, still think my site is too simple. He he.