I would love it as much as being told that my version of Adobe reader or Flash player is out of date every 6 months or so. But I'd probably download the update anyway.

At least one of those sites does say continue fixing for IE6 but put the nag in. I'd say don't abandon good, standards compliant ways of designing just because IE6 chokes on them. If you have a lot of visitors still using IE6, fix it as well as it is possible to, and put the nag in, so they at least know why it may look a little off. That's no more lazy than those %$*(&!! corporations who specifically develop sites for IE and care nothing about other users.

tim

In my opinion, CSS is just a little part of it.
Javascript is the worst.

I stopped testing my javascript on IE6. I use DOM functions, make it functionnal under opera/safari/ie7/firefox.
If someone complaints that it don't work in IE6, when, too bad then.
I won't take hours to fix it, although I'll give it a quick look.

The last time I did a 100% crossbrowser javascript library, it took me 5 hours to make it for safari, ie7, opera and firefox.
But it took me 8 more hours to have it running approximately the same on ie6

It was the last stroke.
Now, when I detect that a user is running ie6, I add a nag box in the footer, pressing them to use a modern web browser.

As for the rendering, I admit that I don't do much of that, I have friends way more talented than me, and as long as it looks ok in IE7, I won't bother further.

Has anyone tried this out? It supposedly makes IE7 act like a standards compliant browser and it has fixes for IE5 & 6 as well.

If you design for IE6 and FF, IE7 will work with almost no changes.

Part of the problem is designing for IE7... MS always puts in all sorts of "neat" things that *work* with their latest version but don't work anywhere else...

The major reason people who have IE6 will upgrade is for tabbed browsing, but most of the people who wanted that got impatient waiting for IE7 and switched to FF anyway.

You don't just have corporations on IE6, you also have schools, along with anyone else who doesn't want to upgrade just because MS is *finally* catching up to FF...

Look at your stats and see how many people are using IE6. That will give you your answer as to what to do. For the majority of my websites, there are FAR too many people still using IE6 to just let it be broken.

Designing for IE7 is like designing for a Vista environment, or designing for 1280x1024 resolution. It's too soon. Yes, a lot of people use high resolutions. A lot of people don't.

Yes, there are still people on dial-up, and it's not cavemen. There ARE still places in this country where DSL and cable aren't available. (No, I wouldn't want to live there.)

- On my personal desktop (Windows 2000) I have IE6 and FF. I design for both. So far, I have never had any complaints about anything not working in IE7, because I design for IE6 and IE7 seems mostly backward compatible.
- I also design my websites for 1024x768 resolutions. Yes, people are still using that. People are still using 800x600 for that matter, although I finally abandoned that small of a layout about a year ago.
- I also anticipate that some of my users will be on dial-up, and I monitor and give consideration to issues like image file size, page size, server-side loading time, etc, to try and keep the loading time of the "lowest common denominator" user to a minimum.

I guess it depends on what you're doing. If you're making a corporate intranet, you can be very specific about what you build for because you are aware of and possibly control the environment the site will be used in. If you're making a site of general interest that kids are going to be on, and parents, you can't assume much of anything except that they have a computer.

I will probably continue to design for IE6 until there's not a compelling reason for people to continue using Windows 2000 as an OS. I don't foresee that happening with Vista since it didn't happen with XP... just more bells and whistles to justify more revenue for MS but nothing SIGNIFICANTLY improved.

But the web statistics tell you exactly what you should be designing for. IE6 users are still a hefty percentage of my users, how about yours?

Well, on my main site (web-screenshots.com, look at my sig), as of today for the current month, I have
Firefox: 80.1%
Mozilla: 12.3%
IE: 6%

From those 6%,
IE6: 1.5%
IE7: 4.5%
The rest is IE 5.5 and below.

The rest of the hits are shared between Safari and Opera.

IE7 isn't that big a problem, while it still has that stupid 'hasLayout' and a few minor bugs, it's a HUGE step up from IE6.

Originally Posted by VirtuosiMedia

Has anyone tried this out? It supposedly makes IE7 act like a standards compliant browser and it has fixes for IE5 & 6 as well.

Wow this is awesome, I'll have to try this out.

Nice idea, but it didn't work for me.

tim