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For those of you who read an earlier post of mine, you'll understand that my site has AdSense ads and no ads load in IE 7. In fact, I tested another website that uses ads in the same browser and even they don't show up.

I checked my user access log for my website for there seems to be some people still using IE 6 along with other older web browsers but the numbers aren't in the majority.

Now I see from https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/191268?hl=en that AdSense only wants to support IE 10 and up.

In the other post I made, someone suggested I should try to encourage users to upgrade their browser but not in a forceful manner but I'm not sure if that's enough to convert a user to a browser in which they actually see the AdSense ads.

The point here is that I want everyone who visits my website to see at least one ad per visit and so far, IE 7 is preventing that from happening. Installing IE 6 is a joke on XP so I couldn't test in that. Luckily on webpagetest.org a computer in Montreal running IE 8 showed the ads.

I admit I do suck at advertising and I also don't want to hurt real users.

So what would be the grand solution here?

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  • A friend of mine who graduated from Harvard Business School said that they drummed into their heads every day- Know when to cut your losses. In this case, you may have to simply discard the IE 6 and 7 users. You can put a banner up stating that their browser does not take advantage of newer web standards. I would not encourage IE, but I would encourage Chrome. The reason why is simple. IE allocates memory for each and every tag in each and every page visited and fails to give the memory back. This could also be a selling point since IE crashes computers and at minimum renders them useless.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Oct 23, 2015 at 3:41
  • Do you have sources about IE misusing memory? I think I'll need to make a huge article along with a custom banner
    – Mike -- No longer here
    Commented Oct 23, 2015 at 3:43
  • Another possible tag would be to say that your site uses HTML 5 and that their browser does not support HTML 5 and the latest version of JavaScript. Do what you can. I never see IE 6 or rarely 7 anymore. It could be just a few non-techna-dweebs.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Oct 23, 2015 at 3:43
  • 3
    "there seems to be some people still using IE 6 along with other older web browsers" - real users or bots?
    – MrWhite
    Commented Oct 23, 2015 at 9:04
  • 1
    Good question but imagine if 1 real user used IE6 and was looking for a site with ads to click on...
    – Mike -- No longer here
    Commented Oct 23, 2015 at 19:56

1 Answer 1

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Unfortunately there is not much you can do to prevent this as there will always be people in the world who use outmoded technology far beyond its usefulness. You can add a banner block (which should be closeable) which states that their browser is not fully supported and that you recommend updating to a more recent browser to get full use out of your site, however this is a request and suggestion and not something that people will feel obliged to you. You will of course have people who do as the banner reminds them to upgrade, but there will be others who resist and choose not to upgrade for whatever reason they feel is valid and at the end of the day no matter how much energy you expend in trying to deal with it you won't change those minds.

They can't see the ads, okay, but at the end of the day those with old unsupported browsers are in the minority and in all honesty are unlikely to make as substantial an increase to your AdSense revenue as you will spend in time and effort to implement something that will "encourage" them to upgrade.

All you can do is provide the unsupported warning and the rest is up to them.

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