[James Mitchell]

In a twitter conversation this evening. I was talking about how much I dislike IE6 and the support I'm forced to provide for it. Afterall, still around 13% of our client's website traffic consist of IE6 visitors. This percentage still being too high to not consider this browser at all. Graceful degradation came up.

So....

• What is your definition of Graceful Degradation? What do you leave off, allow to remain, or "politely break"?
  
• How are conversions affected by such degradation, if any?
  
• Lastly, how do your clients respond when you tell them that those visitors will have a reduced website experience?

[Catalyst]

13% seems unusually high, around 3x the average. I feel for you.

I know it doesn't really answer your specific questions, but to me it really comes down to money. Is it worth it to the client to spend the extra money to support that segment of users, and if so how much is it worth? Getting a site to look almost identical I often see quoted as an extra 50%, just looking decent maybe little to no extra. So really I just see it as a business decision on the client's side. I've had clients who sent free laptops of to their customers to get them on a modern browser instead of putting the money into supporting macs and IE6 for their extranet.

[Karl Buckland]

I think it's at that point where it's worth asking clients to pay more to support IE6, especially when the majority of those still using IE6 are corporate customers. Most home users have upgraded, or bought a new computer by now.

[denny]

I think IE6 is worth to use.But i appreciate your conversation and opinions cause you all are experienced persons.

[JakeMcGreg]

IE6 is still significant to many people. I like your opinions about IE6 though. I hope Chrome will give lots of benefits and advantages as well.

[sitebuilder]

Internet Explorer 6 came out in 1999 ..13% seems crazy high. And yes I think it's extremely acceptable to require your client to pay more to support software that is 12 years old. I never check any browser more than 5 years old in my freelance work and no client has ever asked me to do so, but I imagine if the client has records that it really is 13% of their market they will likely be willing to pay extra for the support.

[EncoderDecoder]

yeah, I believe this figure is still true.. even the company I am training under now tells us to check the quality of our projects when run in an IE browser.. IE is still a widely used browser, after all..