All web developers could bond on the tedium of supporting IE6. There’s nothing like designing in FireFox, the couple of fixes for IE7 and switching to IE6 only to see complete mayhem. All your pngs have light blue backgrounds, the javascript crashes the whole browser every other load and the layout, well it isn’t layed out anymore. There are campaigns to Save A Developer and Stop IE6, a million blog posts about giving up on IE6 completely (some high profile people actually have) and idiots that start posts with “I’m a webmaster. I hate IE6. Period.”
The problem is, we don’t have a choice. It’s hard to grasp but less than 1% of the people using the internet know what IE6 is and yet 40% of them are using it. Sticking a modal pop-up over your site isn’t going to get these people to update their browser. If for some reason you didn’t support IE6 people won’t think “Oh, what a terrible browser I’ve got”. They’ll either think that your website is broken or, even worse, that it’s broken their computer. And you’ll lose 40% of your potential users just like that.
Of all the reasons that people use IE6, none will go away. They either have to use it (at work), dislike change (click “no” to every update dialog) or don’t know what they’re doing (parents). We’ll just have to wait this out and while we’re waiting, here’s a few things to help:
- Reset your html. The default rendering of many of IE6s elements differs greatly from modern browsers (it is 7 years old after all). Resetting your CSS will give you a level playing field to start off with.
- Use conditional comments. If all those hacks start targeting other browsers in the future you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. Conditional comments will only ever target the one browser and give you one place to store all your IE6/7 changes.
- Production with IE6 in mind. With a complicated design, many uses of the IE6 png fix on one page can lead to slow rendering times. Chop up your designs with this in mind and leave the background in.
Of course by the time IE6 has gone, we’ll all be whinging about IE7 not supporting anything we want.
