I thought I’d dedicate this new post to IE 6 and it’s practicality in todays design and development world. It will come to no suprise to people who know me, my feelings towards IE6 and even IE, I hate it! Sure I loved it back in the day when I based all my layout and testing on this browser but do we really need to accommodate this browser in todays practices? My frustrations are multi fold, firstly for me the most annoying issue…it doesnt render CSS/XHTML that well, it cant handle transparent pngs (not without a bug fix) and lets face it, IE7 soon to be 8, Safari and Firefox have the monopoly on all browsers used out there.
A typical example of personal frustration is, I’ve been working on a huge site that is built on a pure CSS/XHTML structure, there are many many pages, widgets, dragble content and other visual and user treats that are built for the latest and future browsers. Now it’s hard enough work getting these components to pull together in the “good browsers” but to try get them to work on a dated browser is/was a challenge sure to raise word or two in anger! Another fine example of an IE6 only bug is; we discovered on a couple of sites random text just floating within the page, no matter how much source code we checked, or how many tecchies looked at it we just couldn’t crack it. Then I googled the “random text in IE6″ and sure enough I found that my nice clean html with comments was causing the bug to display the floating random text. EXCELLENT! So all those keep code clean and use comments articles that is drilled into us is totally irrelevant if your intending to use IE6!!
It’s been over a week since I started writing this post and my thoughts have changed a little!! As much as I dislike IE6 and all that it encompasses I feel that as a designer/developer we should make the sites as accessible to IE6 users as possible. Whilst I still maintain the thinking that its a dilapidated and awkward browser to cater for I do feel it somehow challenges you as a designer to be better at your skill set!
But in summing up, I think it’s best left to a client who I mentioned that to cater for IE6 they would need to invest in extra time and money, their reply was short and to the point!..
“They can download a free update to 7 right?” “Yes” I replied, “well F*ck IE6 then”!!! was the well thought response”
Thanks IE6, it’s been a blast…
people don’t use IE6 because they like it… The fact that drives me crazy is that Microsoft doesn’t move a finger to fix the bugs! I know IE6 is outdated, but the company’s name is on the table!