Is suggesting to update browser is a good way?

My designers almost deny to make slices compatible to IE6.
So, not to limit their creativities, I would simply accept a slice (XHTML/CSS/Javascript/Image) if it behaves good in Firefox and opera, and is XHTML valid on w3 validator.

Even at the delivery, I suggest the customer that it is error free on Firefox. If you are not using it already, please download and use it. 9 out of 10 small projects go smoothly in this manner.

I would rather discuss on what is best way to deal this scene? How do you deliver slicing projects? And, is it good to ask customers upgrade their browses? And what about the customers of our customers, whom we do not talk directly?

Could you explain what you mean by that? It doesn’t mean much to me. I’m wary when anyone talks about using slices, as it sounds like 1990s web design, with tables etc. But I still don’t see what this has to do with IE6. I think of a slice as an image. IE6 displays images.

I think you just have to accept the browser that the client uses, and decide whether you want to design for it or not. If I client came to me and said “I only use IE5”, I wouldn’t work with them.

Try and present your customer with:

  1. Research data on percentage of visitors that still use IE6. This helps if it is targeted to his market.

  2. A list of compromises (loss of features) that they will have to make if compatibility with IE6 is required.

  3. Your conclusion/recommendation.

Then, let your client decide what they want you to do.

What do you mean slices - there is nothing related to the web that is referred to by that term. I think there was back in the days of IE4 (when it referred to slicing up images and sticking them in table cells) but such an approach died out with IE4.

You need to create standard compliant pages that will therefore have the greatest change of working in most of the thousands of different browsers people use. You also need to deal with any browser that doesn’t fully support the standards which has a large enough market share for that particular web site to make it necessary to specifically support that browser. You may want to charge extra for such support but you should at least offer the option.

That is a bad way to do things. Customers are stupid. They think what they see is exactly how everyone is going to see, which is far from true. More so than being worried about what the customer sees is what the audiences experience will be. Most likely the audience is going to consist of a bunch of IE users. So while it may be great the customer has a good experience, its more important that their audience has a good experience from a business aspect. So it really is a developers and designers duty to make sure of that within reason. Things may break in IE11 but that is just something that will need to be dealt with at that time. Seems like this is more so an issue with the developers being lazy or project deadlines being to tight. In the case of the later I guess its just a consequence of low balling projects. In case of the former were there is enough time than perhaps you need to start cleaning house. In either case it sounds like the people whom work on the front-end aren’t very passionate or good at what they do. I always go though Safari, IE6, IE7, IE8, chrome and opera after I have everything looking good in FF… always. Recently smart phones to.

Off Topic:

I’m sure your customers won’t be pleased to hear that. What if I happened to be a customer of yours? I might opt to go elsewhere if that’s what you actually think about your customers. There’s probably a more tactful way to put that :wink:

I always assume that people have no idea what they are doing which yields more usable, cross-browser compatible and robust software. When people complain that software is to hard to use it is because it wasn’t created with someone stupid in mind. Make few assumptions about the user and there will be less issues down the line. When I have the freedom to I always strive for a dumb interface over one that assumes the user knows anything at all.

That’s a bit of a cop out. People are really busy, and don’t have time to get a new 3-year degree every time they want to try out a new program. OK, some things just take time, but a lot of software is hard to use because the developers—though clever enough to create the software—have no idea how to explain what it does or how to use it. It’s all too common, and really quite sad IMHO.

My blog design also have the same problem since I make it my self and honestly I have no more knowledge about cross browsing. this blog is compatible with all firefox version but the problem in older IE6. I think a link to upgrade browsers could not be the wrong thing.

Best Regards!

Its great to have your website compatible in all browsers, but there has to be a stopping point. I feel that IE6 is a stopping point, Microsoft is even stopping support on it and putting IE updates in their window updates.

The number of people using IE7 ands earlier now is falling so fast that you will probably never get a huge number of visitors using those browsers. So spending big money to get the pages to look the same for that handful as it does for everyone else is a waste of that money. As long as the pages look acceptable in those antiques and still work it doesn’t matter that the page looks nothing like how it looks in modern browsers. Around 2004/5 there was a period when taking that same attitude to Netscape 4 meant that those using more modern browsers could be presented with nice looking pages using CSS while those using Netscape got little more than the plain text and content images.

Our web page designers and web programmers always have different browsers (updated and not) to check if the pages have any browsing error when viewed. I think it’s a good practice to make a quality check of the web pages posted in the website with regards with the browsers that the users might be using for it.