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I apologize if my title sounds cruel to some, but today, I used an older computer with windows XP and Internet Explorer 6, and to my dismay, no adsense ads showed on my website, but in other web browsers, ads load perfectly fine. I searched Google to see what the problem was only to find articles talking about adsense ads not loading in I E7 through IE 11 inclusive.

I then came across a search result pointing to a website that offers scripts to drive people away from Internet Explorer. It's found at: http://www.explorerdestroyer.com/ They claim that if I strongly direct people away from Internet Explorer then my adsense revenue may go up.

I tried random suggestions from the internet such as applying X-ua-compatible meta tag to my pages with no success.

So what should I do here? Should I just force people to go away from Internet Explorer, or should I add special settings (which I have yet to find) to my webpages (such as HTTP headers or HTML tags) to make adsense load properly in Internet Explorer?

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I suggest you don't drive them away as they are potential customers/followers/visitors.

Placing warnings and headers about old browsers isn't gonna change much other than changing the feeling people will experience at your site.

There are two kinds of people who use old browsers:

  • Those who don't understand computers; They won't update because they don;t know how / find it scary to change stuff "it's working fine now"
  • Those who are limited by their system, e.g. sys-admin doenst update computer/boss thinks it's too expensive/hardware incapable/whatever.

If it's the classic "Can't show ads, so no revenue", you could add a check to see if the ads are loaded, and then show an "we need your support!" message of some sort.

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  • @Mike I agree. IE 7 and 8 should work just fine with XP and Gogle Adsense. In fact, IE 8 is an easy upgrade. I still use XP (embarrassed to say), and dumped IE because it allocates memory for each and every HTML DOM object and does not release the memory later.... silly wabbit! With sites becoming more complicated, IE would chew up the PCU (at least that is how my father says it) extremely fast. So while I agree that IE users are idiots, they have the right to be idiots. You can gently persuade them to use Chrome instead. That would be worthy of sainthood perhaps.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Oct 21, 2015 at 14:30
  • I think I'll need to use webpagetest.org one more time for IE8 through 11.
    – Mike -- No longer here
    Commented Oct 21, 2015 at 16:21
  • @Mike Or use IE 8 or have friend with IE 8... hummmmm who could you get with XP and IE 8... I would have to think about that for a bit...
    – closetnoc
    Commented Oct 21, 2015 at 22:25
  • or make a VM install with XP/IE8
    – Martijn
    Commented Oct 22, 2015 at 7:08
  • Just to add to the "Those who are limited by their system" - something which has often been cited in the past are those on a corporate network using outdated software that "only works on IE6" - ActiveX plugins etc! I have seen this myself with a piece of Lloyds (corporate) banking software that refused to work on later browser versions because of its reliance on outdated (but stable) browser plugins. And there was no later version of the banking software!
    – MrWhite
    Commented Oct 23, 2015 at 9:41
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There are only two people who still have IE6 on their computers and both of them are dead. You, apparently, found a third one. The numbers who use ancient browsers, including IE8, are small but, if it's significant for you, it should show in your analytics software. I'm betting it's less than 5% for IE8. Are they really your customer or audience?

If AdSense ads aren't showing in their browsers, then that means even AdSense won't take care of them. So why are you concerned about it? Microsoft themselves don't support IE less than 9 (or is it 10?).

You don't do anything to people who use ancient browsers. You only ignore their problems cause they're self-inflicted. They're aware of them cause you aren't the only web site they visit. Do you allow for those with Netscape Navigator or IE4? Do you give them any thought at all?

If anything, serve them text only pages. Those are viewable on anything.

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  • The problem is the sites focus is showing new pictures to people. Serving just a text-only site won't work here
    – Mike -- No longer here
    Commented Oct 23, 2015 at 19:58

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