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How do you handle very old browsers on your site?

We have a non-profit website that received about 5 million hits in May. Of these, about 5700 were from IE 5.x or lower; about 4,000 were from people with Netscape 4.x or lower. We know that the current site layout works for new browsers, and we are testing it also on IE6 (along with Chrome, Opera, Safari and Firefox). How do you handle people with old browsers? Due to jQuery libraries etc. Pages may not work correctly in these older browsers.

Is there an easy way to show a text version in browsers that cannot handle CSS and jQuery? How do large sites handle such things? I used @embed to hide the stylesheet from Netscape 4.x, but not sure about that.

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You should not keep old browsers as your main priority - just save the content that can be read on them, and maybe add a useful banner that explains that they use an outdated browser.

However, you don't need to focus on making the layout look 100% the same in browsers that were old, it's just a waste of time. As long as the content is available and they can navigate the site, this should be good.

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Ensure that all content is accessible and readable in a browser such as Lynx, and that no content requires Javascript to read and access.

I would suggest a design for accessibility of disability and see if this leads to such results - kill two birds with one arrow.

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If you use tableless / CSS-based design methods, you can easily get back to text only.

You can use conditional comments to include only css files in a specific version of Internet Explorer.

You can use jquery version validation to run it only on the versions you want.

Something else that I just thought was that you can show the message to old browsers, as I saw across the Internet, urging the user to switch to compatibility and, most importantly, SECURITY. (I think Twitter is doing it now).

And one more thought: if you return to those browsers, you probably have to worry about screen size, since most sites are designed for at least 1024 x 768 these days, but immediately 800x600 was the initial one ...

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Here is what Big G has to say about it :)

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers-for-modern-applications.html

They will no longer support IE6 ...

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