Chuck Conway

In The craft

Design or Not to Design for IE Mac

November 30, 2004 · 2 minute read

Much discussion surrounds supporting IE/5 Mac browser. Should we support it? If yes, for how long—If not, why not?

Designing for a target audience is critical: What platforms do our users use? Does it make sense to design for a browser that commands a small percentage of users?

Four years ago IE/5 Mac was the best browser. It supported Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Level 1 and HTML version 4 (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/ie5mac/). Things have come along way since then. XML, XHTML, CSS 2 and XForms technologies are taking hold. Browsers must evolve with these technologies to give their users a rich experience.

The Numbers

Using TheCounter.com as a web statistics resource I have come up with these numbers. For the month of November 2004:

  • Two percent of web sites where viewed on an Apple PC
  • One percent of total websites viewed in the month of November were viewed on Safari
  • This leaves about one percent using IE/5 Mac

Mid last year (2003) Microsoft announced it was indefinitely halting development on IE for Apple platforms.

Apple now ships Safari with its OS, which is based on Konqueror’s KHTML engine.

With IE/5 Mac numbers dwindling, is it reasonable to develop sites for IE/5 Mac?

Conclusion

It comes down to your traffic. If your development is primarily targeted at windows users, I wouldn’t give any browser based on any platform other than Windows a second thought. However, if your site targets Apple users then it would be wise to design for IE/5 Mac. Considering that half your traffic will be from IE/5 Mac users.

Applying standards to a graphic based design takes about 50 percent of my development time. The other 50 percent is working out the quirks in specific browsers. When developing for IE/5 Mac 30 percent of this time is working on the IE/5 Mac version. Sometimes this includes writing custom code to handle errors in IE/5 Mac. It also may include retarding the design. In the worse case scenario some bugs in IE/5 Mac don’t have workarounds.

Please note this varies based on the complexity of the design. These estimates are based on my experience.

Can 30 percent of development costs be justified for only one percent of the users? Some would argue if it makes the site viewable in all platforms then yes. I say no. IE/5 Mac is a dieing browser. Let it rest.