Drop (or restrict) IE6 support for new core themes

Progressive Enhancement is fine.

Dropping support for IE6 completely is still a pipe dream.
As long as a browser still commands 5% market share and higher, then I don't believe we have the option to completely drop support for it.

Perhaps a better plan would be to put our weight behind
http://www.savethedevelopers.org/
or a similar initiative,
in the spirit of gophp5.org

Alan

I agree, only sites with technical audiences can really think about this now. Drupal serves a wider community.

Well, I'd say the "admin interface of Drupal core" has a technical audience, which is where we'd most likely be dropping support in any real sense.

Marking -Postpone to Active. Otherwise, this discourages discussion and debate. We are all about discussion and debate. There's no patch here so it's all academic at this point.

Here are some reasons off the top of my head for Drupal 7 to add to the discussion.

Pros
1. For garland: Code cleanup and removal. We can remove fix-ie.css and fix-ie-rtl.css and phptemplate_get_ie_styles(). There are still some IE7 hacks in style.css but not as bad as the dedicated fix-ie.css.
2. For garland: Tiny performance increase. Less data transferred. One less CSS file to bootstrap in IE browsers.
3. Less debugging, less work doing fixes and any future new theme for Drupal. This includes any new DHTML/AJAX/AHAH features and fixes in jQuery code. As we can all agree, IE6 is a major waste of time for every web designer and developer since August 2001.
4. As previously mentioned, we can accept PNG transparency in our themes. No need for CSS or JS hacks. This opens up a whole can of creativity and possibilities for garland or any 3rd party theme.
5. Gives a gentle nudge for people to upgrade their browser to "Anything But IE6" (TM)

Cons
1. We annoy people who simply refuse to upgrade especially conservative corporate IT staff, people using old computers, the laggards, people who use default themes in Drupal.
2. We may break old sites/upgraded sites based on IE6 themes.

It may not a big of a problem as in may seem since most custom sites switch out their CSS for custom themes. I would guess most big Drupal installations, are NOT using Garland or any default Drupal theme. That just leaves custom module CSS (which is out of scope here) and jQuery IE6 hacks.

Supporting data for December 2008
-Market share quotes IE6 at 21.53% and IE7 at 47.39%
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2
-thecounter.com quotes IE6 at 35% and IE7 at 42%
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2008/December/browser.php

In the timeframe of D7 release, I'm guessing that'll be Q2-Q3 2009, IE8 will have been out a few months. I'm guessing IE8 will release Q1 2009. At that point IE6 will become the IE5.5 of today. IE6 market share will plummet precipitously as everybody will finally make the move.

Another less disruptive path... We may accept a new default theme, other than Garland and choose to break IE6 compatibility there.

Any more ideas?

I can understand using market data , but what about the real world, its affected by usersbase, so has anyone checked their sites?

I will just throw in REAL statistics for my own site for consideration for or against the argument

These are January 2009 figures so not a full month but the percentages should help as a guide. I have only broken it down to show the major browsers with IE6 as a comparison.

MSIE - 1101390 hits - 55.8%
comprising
IE 8 - 16175 hits - 0.8%
IE 7 - 809441 hits - 41%
IE 6 - 272170 hits - 13.7%

Firefox - 685751 hits - 34.7%

The rest 185815 hits - 9.2%

As a thought, formal release of IE8 may not mean a drop in IE6 but in IE7.

IE8 RC1 was just released. It'll go gold in a month or so. It'll have really good CSS 2.1 support and Acid 2 compliance. Meanwhile Dries stated D7 will hit Q4 of 2009. Also, Windows 7 will release Q4 2009 or Q1 2010.

Hitslink and thecounter are huge stat aggregators across thousands of sites spanning all genres. The sample size is as good as any.

Just to put my $0.02 in: For 2009, I am no longer working to make my new site developments work fully in IE6. I'm still fixing show-stopping bugs and layout problems, but if there's a 10px gap somewhere, or if a PNG has a grey background, so be it.

It's my view that the world would be a better place if we leave IE 6 stragglers out to dry so they will be forced to upgrade. Even the 'conservative old guard IT shops.' The only people that actually require IE6 anymore are the few shops that wrote heavily customized IE6-only apps and database interaction software. I would venture to say that 20% of current IE6 users can upgrade, but are just too lazy. Let's give them the impetus to do so!

We dropped PHP4 support for Drupal 7 when there was still a considerable percent of servers using PHP4. Why do we have to continue to sacrifice for the sake of backwards-through-the-hoop compatibility and IE6 when we do not do the same internally? Do we need a GoIE7.com? :)

There is one big difference when we talk about which version of PHP and browser versions. The person developing the site has control over the hosting choice and therefor PHP version. Same developer has no control over end users and the reality is there are still more than a few people using IE6.

I must agree with nevets. As much as I despise IE6 (I loath it. I really, really loath it.), accessibility is part of my organization's mission. That includes schools and individuals who are too poor to afford even remotely modern computers. In the last month, over 17% of our site's visitors were using IE6, so I expect I will need to support it for quite some time (sigh).

Pushing developers and hosting companies to use newer/better/safer technology is one thing. Forcing users to upgrade is a good way to loose users.

Just to add some perspective (warning: offensive language inside): http://hugsformonsters.com/

(And no, this is not a serious solution to the problem ;-)

I'm pulling refining the title. New core themes, such as "Stark" and new core themes to be included should work with IE7 & above and not support IE6. We can all agree to that I hope. Garland will be a snapshot in time back when we supported IE6.

Regarding D7 core CSS, there shouldn't be any specific IE6 hacks. If there are, we need to rip them out!

We're using jQuery 1.3 in Drupal 7, which keeps the IE6 support. As much as I hate it, I think we should follow what jQuery supports in terms of browsers for Drupal 7. Drupal has a very handy browser compatibility CSS conditional goodness, so we should use it. I vote a yes on dropping the IE6 support in Drupal 8 though, because come on, how much of your time have you given to Microsoft already over IE6 issues? Seriously.

This definitely isn't a place for Stark though, like momendo mentioned.

@Dave Reid at #8: Maybe a GoOpenStandards.com would be better ;-) . Gecko and Webkit are much better rendering engines then any of the Internet Explorers, and they conform to the open web standards...

Let's at least move all IE6 hacks to a specific ie.css so we know where they are for later removal.

I also think we shouldn't go out of our way to deal with PNG transparency issues and stuff like that.

@ catch/#14 - I agree with you 100% there. With IE 8 out now, we would need to make sure conditionals are targeted for IE6 and IE7, because if you use the normal "If IE," then IE 8 gets screwed up, because, ironically, it's actually fairly compliant.

The difference is that we can control which version of PHP or jQuery we support.

Drupal sites cannot control which browser their visitors are using.

Neither can we control which browser an organization is using. If we would do this, we would lose a fair amount of potential Drupal users.

This is an utopian feature request.

I agree that the lack of control over users for IE6 makes it still mandatory to support IE6 in the core where visitors to the site are concerned, and that each of us as site administrators will choose to what extent we support it in our custom themes (my latest site has downgraded functionality for IE6). Also, that if the functionality is in the admin. section that IE6 is irrelevant, as a developer and/or site admin. I have enough influence to simply make everyone use FF for the admin. of Drupal - and for the most part I do.

One question remains in my mind which is given that:
a) Last I checked bots & scanners of various kinds will most likely use an IE6 looking agent
b) That my corporate users who have IE6 mandated by their arcane IT depts., also have FF3
, how accurate is this 18% or so of IE6?

I have very little faith in this number but since I have nothing better reluctantly base my decisions on it. I have even less faith in elevated levels of FF use on my owns sites since I already know my own influence on them greatly elevates that percentage above the norm.

Regarding catches comment #14 and geerlingguy's follow #15: this is how I do it on my custom themes and with IE8 will probably drop the first condition but haven't had time to test with IE8 yet. Agreed, all IE hacks (perhaps not just IE6) should be in a specific (or set of) CSS file(s).