Progress Towards 1.5.0

people still request there custom design to be compatible wit MSIE6+ even thu less than 10% are using it.
i guess when it come to loosing money from those 10%, no one can afford

IMHO. i would say consider ie6 for now, and maybe when ie9 come out> bug fixed> releases few stable patches> til then we can still count ie6 in.

Speaking as a shop owner rather than a web developer, IE6 still represents between 10-15% of all web users, so I guess the question is, would shop owners like to lose potentially 1 in 10 customers by presenting a malformed site to them? Times are tough enough without alienating customers.

The reality is people will only upgrade when they buy a new PC. They are the ones using the 'official' browser that came with their machine.

CUSTOM_UK wrote: The reality is people will only upgrade when they buy a new PC. They are the ones using the 'official' browser that came with their machine.

while it is true that people only upgrade the browser when they upgrade the computer those people are no where near the 10% of web users that still use ie6 the VAST majority of people that are using ie6 are coming from corporations that refuse to upgrade because they wrote some buggy POS intranet that only works with ie6. So I would say honestly unless you are in a business that caters to corporate users your probably only going to see maybe 1% ie6 usage. Of course you would have to look at your own stats to know for sure. For instance on my site I've had less than 2% ie6 visits. Of course my market is much less likely to use ie6 and I've got almost a full 50% firefox visits.

Personally I think the issue is a matter of industry standards Vs backwards compatibility (rather than industry Vs users). For example, if you stopped supporting IE6 now, other developers may soon follow suit and then IE6 users would be forced to upgrade. The longer you offer backwards compatibility, the longer users will stick with their current browser. So industry really needs to be the driving force behind the change.

Additionally, Xsecrets makes a very good point about businesses being the main IE6 'culprits'. Many larger organisations are also moving to SharePoint as their Intranet which means IE6 will likely be phased out at the same time. Store owners are realistically only going to lose about 1% of buyers (and that's assuming the site is totally unusable in IE6).

For these reasons I personally wouldn't bother supporting IE6. It will die soon enough.

Whilst I can only speak about my own sites in definitive terms, I have a lot of activity from IE6 users around lunchtime in the week, including actual purchases. It would be a fair assumtion to say those are probably folks at work using the standard IE6 setup and with no possibility of them installing an alternative browser. They are still potential customers though and only a fool in business would want to exclude customers. If they had say a choice of five sites and two of those sites gave corrupted outputs, it would also be a fair assumption to say they would do their shopping on one of the three sites that is still compatible with their browser.

On some sites when viewed through IE6 it is not always cosmetics, but often a lack of functionality as well. Category displays not showing, inactive quantity boxes and even add to cart buttons that cease functioning.

Web developers may have their own legitimate perspectives, but it is the actual shop owners that lose the revenue. I use Firefox myself and whilst IE6 may be getting long in the tooth, I wouldn't want to alienate my customers by telling them they can't enter the store until they come back wearing the right colour tie.

Yeah, I can definitely see your perspective. I suppose from OpenCart's point of view, the key development issues are what functionality may be decreased (or progress inhibited), and how much time needs to be spent by having to support IE6. But as you say, from a store owner point of view, even one customer lost is money down the drain.

The problem is there's no universally-appropriate set of statistics to answer the question. Stores that sell electronics are probably more likely to have customers who use Firefox or Chrome. Stores that sell wholesale computer parts are probably more likely to have customers who are from educational institutions such as primary schools, in which case there's ever possibility they'll be using older software as well.

I guess we'll leave this one to Daniel and Qphoria... or maybe it could be a poll?

I think that maybe you should wait for IE9 final before stop supporting IE6.

This is later this year-begining 2011

CUSTOM_UK wrote: I have a lot of activity from IE6 users around lunchtime in the week, including actual purchases. It would be a fair assumtion to say those are probably folks at work using the standard IE6 setup and with no possibility of them installing an alternative browser.

I think you have nailed it there custom_uk .. that seems a likely source of IE6 users.

They must find that many sites don't work for them. But as people increasingly use iPhones and the like, perhaps that will diminish as an issue?

Suggestion: drop IE6 support for OC 1.5x and later, but keep earlier OC versions live for those who still want to cater for IE6? Good idea/bad idea?

It's up to the theme developers to support IE6, it doesn't affect the back end workings of the cart

I have to say, I'd far rather use IE6 than a smartphone to browse the web

CUSTOM_UK wrote: I wouldn't want to alienate my customers by telling them they can't enter the store until they come back wearing the right colour tie.

unfortunately that's not really a fair analogy since there are actual costs to supporting ie6 users even if you don't see them the web designer/developer do. A more appropriate analogy would be if you are an electronics repair shop do you fix tube televisions? You have to have special equipment to fix them that cost you money. If you specialize in working in museums maybe you do, but most don't, or possibly more appropriate analogy computer repair shops do they still repair old computers? The parts are hard to find and cost more money so most don't fix them. I'm not saying that the theme shouldn't support ie6 I just want the shop owners that do not understand that there are real cost in development time and effort associated with supporting ie6.

Xsecrets wrote:I'm not saying that the theme shouldn't support ie6 I just want the shop owners that do not understand that there are real cost in development time and effort associated with supporting ie6.

OK put it in a different context say in a bricks and mortar store. You approach the shop owner and tell them you want to fit a new door entry system that will exclude every tenth customer. How many shop owners do you think would warm to that particular concept? That is in effect what excluding IE6 browser users would do.

Whilst I fully agree that IE6 causes headaches, it is just like every other technical problem that businesses encounter, you either find a resolution, or you lose business. For the new version of OpenCart, it would hardly be a selling point saying it does not work with IE6 when virtually all of the other open source solutions still do.

Perhaps a mid way solution is to incorporate a browser detect that puts up an IE6 warning dialogue, rather than presenting the viewer with a malformed site that looks like it has been built by a seven year old.

CUSTOM_UK wrote:

Xsecrets wrote:I'm not saying that the theme shouldn't support ie6 I just want the shop owners that do not understand that there are real cost in development time and effort associated with supporting ie6.

OK put it in a different context say in a bricks and mortar store. You approach the shop owner and tell them you want to fit a new door entry system that will exclude every tenth customer. How many shop owners do you think would warm to that particular concept? That is in effect what excluding IE6 browser users would do.

Whilst I fully agree that IE6 causes headaches, it is just like every other technical problem that businesses encounter, you either find a resolution, or you lose business. For the new version of OpenCart, it would hardly be a selling point saying it does not work with IE6 when virtually all of the other open source solutions still do.

Perhaps a mid way solution is to incorporate a browser detect that puts up an IE6 warning dialogue, rather than presenting the viewer with a malformed site that looks like it has been built by a seven year old.

no actually it would be more like saying well every 100th customer coming into your store will be over 500 pounds and they really have to squealer to get through the doorway you have, but they can get in. Do you want us to spend alot of time and money to accomidate the 1% of grossly obese people?

Speaking as a developer and a shop-owner...

IE6 is evil. The sheer amount of time that the developers will waste on making it "IE6 compatible" will potentially seriously hinder the rest of the projects development speed.

So the question is:
Should good development be slowed down and even held back for the sake of less than 6.7% of potential users.

August 2010 only 6.7% (according to W3) use IE6 - and I can happily say that nearly ALL these users are CORPORATE users (i.e. people who work for companies, who are looking at websites from work).

Most home users are on at least 7 due to IE update and various ad-campaigns, companies have to hold back since much of their vendor software "only works with IE6" and they're too tight to pay for the newer versions.
(I'm in this exact same scenario where I work - and there's a good 10,000 users to support and about 40 bespoke systems).


The major issues with IE6 are:
-CSS
-Javascript Engine

CSS - IE6's engine is horrific and doesn't render well (issues with PNG, padding, margins, selectors, etc) , hence all the lovely "IE6" hacks we have to do. The best resolution for this is to use CSS Selector: http://rafael.adm.br/css_browser_selector/ to make IE6 specific CSS changes, avoiding horrible "_" ie6 hacks.

Javascript Engine - IE6's JS engine is impossibly slow, which leads to poor user experience. There's no way around this.


One other good solution is the promotion of Googles Chrome Frame:
http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/
- but this will prompt users to install the addon, but solves all issues since it then makes IE use the Chrome engine.


I'd suggest that Chrome Frame is implemented and we just put a warning up for any IE6 (or prior) users that they need to upgrade for security purposes.

Aside from that dump all IE support. Lets face it, the issues are mostly CSS based.

(Oh IE6 pandering also massively kills design and development passion!)

P.S.
Don't forget, IE6 is immensely insecure, so by prompting users to upgrade - you're going to be helping to safeguard them from malicious attacks.

(Despite being a FF fanboy, IE9 performs amazingly with its new hardware integration...although if someone gets into it, they can seriously total your machine due to this....but its damned fast!:D http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/)

Sadly I have to look at things from a business perspective. Just presenting a malformed site to customers using IE6 is not the sort of image most businesses would wish to portray. Telling users they have to change browsers just to view your site is also a non starter. For those customers using IE6 on the works computer and purchasing my products in their break would cost me lost sales, as they are not in any position to change the default browser.

It is still too early to exclude IE6, unless for some obscure reason folks feel that shop owners would be perfectly happy to lose potential sales. Whilst Daniel still has to make the decision about IE6 and that decision will be his alone, the rest of us have to live in the real trading world, where every lost customer is a gain for our competition.

Incidentally the W3 site attracts 'techies' so their figures do not give a true representation of general web usage. They actually state that on their site.

When all is said and done, the average customer just wants to cruise the net, see some decent photos and an appropriate product description, click and pay. It's hardly rocket science is it??

CUSTOM_UK wrote:Sadly I have to look at things from a business perspective. Just presenting a malformed site to customers using IE6 is not the sort of image most businesses would wish to portray. Telling users they have to change browsers just to view your site is also a non starter. For those customers using IE6 on the works computer and purchasing my products in their break would cost me lost sales, as they are not in any position to change the default browser.

LOL, people shouldn't even be shopping online while at work. Where's their manager....seriously. Can anyone say lost production?

Ok ok, with the joking aside. I can definitely see your point. But personally, I would rather Daniel and Qphoria spend their time making Open Cart even more awesome than it already is, rather than worrying about supporting some old outdated browser.

Someone mentioned this already, but I think OC 1.5+ should exclude support for IE6 as long as all the older versions of OC still support it. I mean, OC 1.4.9.1 is nothing to cry about. If someone wants to have IE6 support, then just don't upgrade your cart to 1.5.

IE9 will be out soon enough, and I think people can use OC 1.4.9.1 until then if they really want to retain IE6 support.

But in the end, i'm saying this as a person who gets like no visits from IE6 users. I imagine i'd be singing a different tune if a large percentage of my sales came from these users.... But I think I could be happy with OC 1.4.9.1 if I needed the IE6 support.

HTMLCSSNoob wrote:IE9 will be out soon enough, and I think people can use OC 1.4.9.1 until then if they really want to retain IE6 support.

The problem with the current OC 1.49 is that customers have to go through the farce of entering all their details just to see the shipping charges. That is the reason I won't deploy on my live sites as that concept belongs on some distant planet. At least Zen Cart has a built in shipping estimator, built in PayPal Express and works with IE6.

Whilst it is difficult to talk about 'sales' when talking about a free open source product, to promote any product over the competition you have to sell that product on what it will do, NOT on what it won't do.

For the past six months, my ie6 visitors have been steady at about 5.5%.

1 in 18, that's a lot.

Remember, OpenCart is opensource - it's free. You're not paying £200 a month for a similar product (which you can).

I'm just thinking about the developers - as I said, being a dev myself it can be really soul destroying having to 'fix things for IE6'.
(In fact I have to do this for all systems I write, I'm good at it, but it can seriously take weeks sometimes on a large system in a high level of interactivity using jQuery or other libraries, since some controls just don't work with IE6 very well)

I honestly cannot put into words how frustrating and horrible it is, seriously, its the number 1 problem most web-software developers cite when they're asking about what the dislike about their jobs.
From having to deal with NHibernate issues, highly complex threading scenario's, generics, reflection, asyncs, interfacing with 30 year old systems, etc - ie6 issues beat them all.

Continuing to support IE6 will hold back development to some degree as it requires time. Even if 1 in 18 customers use IE6, you could be making the experience for 100 potential customers much better by dumping dev for IE6.
You may even get features and releases faster too, helping you to make more sales overall.

There are so many fantastic potential feature opencart could benefit from, which could be worked towards using time that would otherwise be 'used' on IE6 compatibility.


I'd suggest:
Only support IE6 with Chrome frame, or another "requires no further work" solution.

If OpenCart users want to use a newer version and make it IE6 compatible, then they'll have to stick with that version, or pay a dev (or go learn themselves) to modify future releases to work for IE6.

Skyhigh wrote:Remember, OpenCart is opensource - it's free. You're not paying £200 a month for a similar product (which you can).

I'm just thinking about the developers - as I said, being a dev myself it can be really soul destroying having to 'fix things for IE6'.
(In fact I have to do this for all systems I write, I'm good at it, but it can seriously take weeks sometimes on a large system in a high level of interactivity using jQuery or other libraries, since some controls just don't work with IE6 very well)

I honestly cannot put into words how frustrating and horrible it is, seriously, its the number 1 problem most web-software developers cite when they're asking about what the dislike about their jobs.
From having to deal with NHibernate issues, highly complex threading scenario's, generics, reflection, asyncs, interfacing with 30 year old systems, etc - ie6 issues beat them all.

Continuing to support IE6 will hold back development to some degree as it requires time. Even if 1 in 18 customers use IE6, you could be making the experience for 100 potential customers much better by dumping dev for IE6.
You may even get features and releases faster too, helping you to make more sales overall.

There are so many fantastic potential feature opencart could benefit from, which could be worked towards using time that would otherwise be 'used' on IE6 compatibility.


I'd suggest:
Only support IE6 with Chrome frame, or another "requires no further work" solution.

If OpenCart users want to use a newer version and make it IE6 compatible, then they'll have to stick with that version, or pay a dev (or go learn themselves) to modify future releases to work for IE6.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Agreed 100%