I've been taking great care to check compatibility of the pages I have been building of late in Opera, FF, and making adjustments as necessary for IE7. They work fine in all of these and are standards compliant, but IE6 destroys them, mostly because of the use of negative margins and bleeding elements outside of their content areas.

Should I really care, though? Microsoft is only marginally supporting that browser, and since February that's only been to allow people an out to their packaged upgrade, and they'll likely pull out all support for it when IE8 goes out full force. Why dumb down solid designs or do elaborate workarounds for a browser that's finally getting its well-deserved execution?

Putting the time in to do another separate stylesheet or fix every page for that pathetic browser, to me, is like putting a new film out on video tape when you can get a DVD player for fifty bucks, sometimes less, with better picture quality. Guess what? You're hard-pressed to find a lot of new releases on tape. Similarly, Microsoft itself is pulling out its support for IE6, so why should designers continue to?

The industry has spoken, and whiners who hold on to IE6 should expect that it will destroy a lot of pages. If more designers simply refuse to continue fixing for IE6, IMHO, I think it will make those last few holdouts finally upgrade.

Opinions?

tim

It depends on what percentage of your viewers are using IE6.

Yeah it's an old browser and yeah hopefully one day it will be dead, but losing business because you don't agree with someone's browser seems silly to me.

Microsoft has already started another browser war, with a lot of major companies designing sites "optimized for Internet Explorer". Thing is, some are bold enough to actually state it; others you just know because they look off in the browser you're using. I doubt these companies are hurting for business; I think that for good or bad many users have come to expect this kind of thing, especially from Microsquish. We've already gone back to the bad old days of sites reading, "Best viewed in...." Maybe it would just be adding to the chaos, but it would be cathartic to have a dropdown that read, "Outdated browser detected. Content may not display as well as in current browsers."


But so far as I can tell, most IE6 users are schools who have to go through about 500 layers of red tape to upgrade, and they already know their browser sucks. I don't have any stats on how many businesses still use IE6, but I would think that most would be security-minded enough to have upgraded some time ago.

tim

Lots of businesses are still using IE6 - mine included and we're not exactly a small company. The reasons are many, at least that's what the IT guys say . The company has many custom-designed applications, many thin-client apps that have been done by programmers who know little about web design - so the code is pretty horrendous. BUT, every new update from MS has to be throughly vetted against the installations on 10's of thousands of pc's. They only just completed the rollout of XP to all workstations in the last year !!! They are married to MS through many contracts and agreements, so there's no going with anything else. Heaven only knows when they'll get around to upgrading our browser to IE7, maybe by the time IE10 comes out.. . that's how slow they are to adopt and upgrade. It takes them FOREVER because they've locked themselves into these custom applications.

Our dept had to beg to be allowed to have IE7 installed on 2 test machines so we could test our websites. It's insane, but we as a corporation are not alone in this. Is it stupid on the face of it -- yes - but that doesn't make any difference to them.

As for security - they keep pushing out all the updates that will someday come to an end. That MAY force them to upgrade sooner, but it hasn't so far.

So, what's your opinion on fixing for IE6? There's a lot of layouts I'd like to use but can't seem to dumb down enough to get that browser to like them, even with a separate stylesheet just for it. Are we back to the bad old days of the browser wars? Should I tell people using IE6 that their page is breaking because they're browsing on a Commodore 64?

tim

My solution ? I use a separate stylesheet and conditional comments. My 'iefixes' stylesheet contains ONLY the hacks I need to kick IE6 into compliance. I have learned to modify the way some layouts are coded so that you trigger as few IE bugs as possible. Since MS did fix the bad box model problem in IE6 with some updates, what we're usually left fighting is that stupid hasLayout that still plagues IE7.

The question was actually, "Should we still bother to use separate stylesheets and conditional comments for IE6?" I was elated when you posted that "The (welcome) end of IE6" in the HTML forum; I was hoping you'd have said that the time for having to do those things had passed. You of anyone knows what a pain in the a** it is to build a standards-compliant page, cross-browser compatible for everything including IE7 only to find how badly IE6 butchers it. Just once I built a few really good pages knowing IE6 would butcher them but would work well in everything else and refused to 'tard them down. You know what? It felt really good.

tim

Best viewed in any browser except IE? I know some things are hard, like interpreting a rectangle ... png files are off the table. It's bad. And it makes me wonder how many years we're planning to go on supporting it. Firefox is a memory pig, but it's as fast as IE 6, and a small download. A lot of corporations that have glacial software policies don't let their people install things just because it makes sense to have them, though.

Two years ago, it made sense to support IE 6. It's a lot harder to justify lately, though. The only people I know personally who use 6 are web application testers, and both of them have home computers with the latest and greatest.

I have this gut feeling a lot of the people who use IE 6 outside of work also use dial up?

I am fairly new to this IE6 fix stuff (and to some extent IE7) and have to agree with Tim, I'm not putting any IE6 fixes in my new site - mainly becasue its targeted towards residential clients.
IMHO if your target audiance are residential users then my gues is they wont be using IE6 at all as the updates should be automatic (they probably dont use IE7 anyway), no one outside the web community I know uses it, they ALL use either FF or some other browser (I know the stats show IE being the main one used, it would be interesting if anyone could seperate the states to show corporate clients and residential client use of browsers, there are probably stats on that somewhere)

- the argument for not using IE6 as a lot of companies wont allow staff to upgrade makes sense if the corporate market is where you generate business but, if your target audiance is not corporate there's no sense making allowances for them, if they regulate their software to that extent it would be unlikely they would allow staff to 'browse' the net on company time so you wouldn't get any residential clients from a corporate office (until they went home and got on a machine with a deacent browser anyway)

If you are doing a site for a client the same could apply - is thier target audiance residential?
Thats what I reacon anyway - for what its worth.

IMHO if your target audiance are residential users then my gues is they wont be using IE6 at all as the updates should be automatic (they probably dont use IE7 anyway),

You're making an awful lot of assumptions there. How do you KNOW everyone has their Windows set to auto-update ? You don't. I don't let Windows update run amuck on my pc. It's my experience with most home users is that they are on either end of the update curve - they either let MS run roughshod over their computers and do what it wants - or they have auto updates turned OFF completely and don't update manually regularly if at all. Maybe households in the UK and Europe are different ?

Most 'typical' home users here are rarely aware that there is anything BUT IE to use at all and if they are aware, they aren't savvy enough to go get Firefox or Opera to install it. In 25+ years in IT, I've seen all levels of computer users, and the 'home users' are the most clueless of all.

My point is, the effort it takes to make a layout work in IE6 is NOT that big a deal, it's small potatoes in my book, and we've got close to 200 sites live now, with another 46 in the queue. I know what the bugs are, I know how to beat them, but more importantly, I've learned to code a layout so that it doesn't TRIGGER those bugs. My 'iefixes' css file usually contains less than 10 lines of code, if that.

I hate IE6 as much as any web developer, but since my stats show IE6 is still a major portion of our visitors, I cannot alienate them. Our sites are for doctor's offices.. so who do you think my audience is ?? Yeah... that 'residential' user.

I agree with LNR. You're all making a lot of assumptions about who is and isn't using which browser. I just checked my stats. About half of my site visitors use IE and a third of those used version 6. So 1/6 of visitors to my site over the last month did so using IE6. That's enough for me to want the site to work in IE6.

The truth is you don't know who those people are. Some might be interested in buying from your or subscribing to your blog or whatever else you want them to do. It's really not that hard to use conditional comments and use an IE6 only style sheet. I think I maybe end up with a half dozen IE6 only styles.

For the half hour it takes to add that extra style sheet it seems worth it to me. Sure I'd rather not have to, but it's not exactly hard and if it convinces one person to revisit the site the time spent thinking about IE6 has a positive return.

Originally Posted by LadynRed

My point is, the effort it takes to make a layout work in IE6 is NOT that big a deal, it's small potatoes in my book, and we've got close to 200 sites live now, with another 46 in the queue. I know what the bugs are, I know how to beat them, but more importantly, I've learned to code a layout so that it doesn't TRIGGER those bugs. My 'iefixes' css file usually contains less than 10 lines of code, if that.

Well, you have far greater experience than I do. I learned to "do it right", then tweak for Opera, then use conditional comments for IE7. Then it takes me just as long to fix for IE6 as it does to actually build the site. That IS a big deal. And I feel like I've wasted my time learning to do it right if I have to effectively code two sites--the right one and the 'tarded down one. I admire that you know the bugs, can work around them quickly and can help people here that encounter them. But by the time most of us gain your experience IE6 will likely be long dead.

And who do I have to thank for that colossal waste of my time? Some corporate IT departments who say they still have IE6 on their machines "for a very good reason", that reason being what? That they have seniority and an excuse to slack? Same goes for the bureaucrats keeping it on the machines in government and schools. I'd think that people like us would be pushing harder to finally kill this browser off. Do people back out of sites that say they need a Flash player to use it? Some, but I doubt most. I wonder if a nag to update IE would actually work for the homebody types?

tim

Do you think that by always accommodating the cavemen, you're slowing the death of IE 6? If sites that used modern concepts like GIF files and CSS didn't work, people might be a little more willing and eager to change their browser.

John I understand your point, but I'd hardly call IE6 users caveman. Was IE7 even available a year ago? Maybe it was, but IE7 hasn't been with us that long. People are still using IE6 right now, enough that it's worth spending the half hour or so to get your site working for them.

I stopped developing for IE5.5, but I'll continue to consider IE6 for awhile.

I don't think people are automatically updating browsers just because some things don't work. Most of those people aren't going to know why the site didn't work. They're just going to see it not working for them and leave. I agree at some point you can't develop for everyone. It doesn't make sense to, but to stop developing for a browser that only a year ago was the most widely used browser in the world doesn't seem like the best idea to me.

Umm, IE6 represents just under 45% of our current user base! There's no way I'd alienate those users just yet

Some people just "don't like" IE7 or are resistant to change (look at Vista for an example of this taken to extremes). Or in the case of businesses it takes a while before it's considered mature enough for a corporate environment. We only rolled it out a few weeks ago ourselves and it's already causing problems, ranging from users with differing opinions on Cleartype all the way to emergencies created by banking websites not working (requiring a rollback).

Design to please the user, not to please yourself, at least if you intend to do business. I don't think our clients would be too happy if we started implying they were cave men

I totally agree with LNR. http://tycoontalk.freelancer.com/showthread.php?p=710255

I have quite a few sites up and only 1 has any "special" handling for IE6 and that is only because some of the pages needed some TLC to get them "just right" for the client. Every thing else is left "as is" and just works.

I use IE6 because my OS is Windows 2000 and to "upgrade" for me would actually be a retrograde step.
The machine I use is more than capable of running XP or Vista but I really have no use for the extra "features" that these OS's have stuffed into them, which will only serve to slow me down, with either finding ways to turn them off, or by having to click numerous "Are you sure" dialogue boxes.

What do you even use to check a page in IE6 anymore? I went to 7 quite awhile ago, so the only way I can even check a page in IE6 is looking on the computer at work (a school, mind you). Is there anything that will display a page *exactly* like IE6 does? Mind you, any page I have to 'tard down for that browser I will put a dropdown nag with a link to upgrade, something that reads, "Outdated browser detected. Current browser required to display page properly." It works for Adobe every time they come out with a new version of Flash player. And no one calls people who only use current versions of it lazy.

tim

There are compatibility checkers that are free, like Netrendere and Browsershots. Look in the stickies in the HTML forum. Then there's a standalone version of IE that can be had that is supposed to run independently w/o hooking itself into the OS.

I have now heard that Facebook posts a nag to upgrade if it's viewed in IE6. I'll have to check that out to verify it.

So I'm apparently not alone in wanting to use that tactic. So if you simply must keep supporting this browser, think about putting a conditional nag in. These two sites offer examples, but I'd recommend doing something similar but smaller and less annoying:

http://www.end6.org/

http://www.savethedevelopers.org/index.php?s=1

Looking at the code, IE6 is unlikely to be able to block this tactic because of a security vulnerability. The irony of that is staggering.

tim

And of course users just love being nagged by lazy developers

Standalone IE6 can be grabbed here: http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone