How to inform users that his browser is not supported

Question

I'm working at a small company and we are developing a web application. With the very few resources we have available, we can't afford to assemble the development team we would like to (we are only two people). The web app is becoming very complex over time and it is very difficult to keep progress with IEx, Firefox, Safari, and others. We try to be clean at coding so we have an almost functional web app for all non IEx modern browsers, but IE is another story.

How do we inform users that IE is not supported at all and they should install a modern browser to continue?

Please keep in mind that the question isn't if we should or should not support IE. Because we won't. The question is how to inform the users to change browser.

Currently we have a small white box on top of page that displays some text and has some links to Firefox and Chrome. Do you have any ideas on how to achieve this? Anyone who has addressed this problem before and has some experience?

Answer 1

IE supports conditional comments, which is kind of weird, but it will work in this case. You can do something like this:

<!--[if IE]> Get a better browser! <![endif]-->

To any other browser (FF, chrome, safari, etc.) This will just look like a normal HTML comment and will be ignored, however IE will actually evaluate the statement and render what you ask it to.

Edit: Check the MSDN article on conditional comments for more information. This feature has been around since IE 5, so it's pretty safe and reliable to use.

Answer 2

1) Do you support a gracefully reduced subset of functionality on IE?

If so, pop up a warning message the first time the user sees the app, stating that due to technical limitation of Internet Explorer software, the app's functionality is reduced

if not, display an explicit error page stating that another browser is needed.

2) Do your potential users have a great level of trust in you?

if Joe Schmoe web page comes in and tells me to install XXX, I will tell that web page "no".

So the best approach is to link to some TRUSTED web source explaining non-IE browsers and how to install them, either instead of in addition to your own instructions.

Answer 3

Well although i don't recommend you to do this display them this image:

_{(source: gosquared.com)}

and say "Instead of wasting time with IE, we choose to ......." (get things done etc...)

And provide few web browser download link. Do not provide many, people can get confused.

Also you can provide some links such as: http://stopie.wordpress.com/