There is a campaign going on over at SaveTheDevelopers that focuses on assisting users in upgrading their Internet Explorer 6 web browser. This campaign will result in former IE 6 users having a more enjoyable experience on the web while (hopefully) creating a less stressful and complicated environment for web developers by hastening the retirement of an outdated browser.
I fully support this campaign and truly beleive that IE6 should not be used anymore as web developers (including me) spend way too much trying to get stuff working in IE6 just to cover the less than 10% of people that still use it.
Having said that, I have installed the script from the site and if you are browsing this website in IE6, you will see a little box at the top right of this page popping up every few mins to remind you to upgrade your browser.
#1 by Glen on June 5, 2008 - 3:55 pm
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It’s easy to encourage people to upgrade their browser, but often my audience is in local government / corporate environments where the user can’t upgrade, so IE6 support is required.
I think that supporting IE6 is not that difficult, depending on your workflow.
The main things I have problems with in IE6 are the box model & PNG alpha support. In most of my work, I will use an extra div where necessary to get around the box model problem and use GIF’s or a PNG hack for the images. I don’t see these as a major hassle, from my perspective. Standards people may complain, but then an extra div means no CSS hacks and IE dependent style sheets are easy to accommodate.
There are still bugs with IE7, Safari 2 on the Mac, and other browsers. A good developer should be able to take these in their stride. I would say that getting developers who use Mac’s to test their websites on the PC is more of a problem than supporting IE6, but that’s only an opinion based on seeing the majority of problems occur on sites made by people I know who use Mac’s rather than PC’s. At the end of the day, as long as the customer knows what they are getting and the cost of supporting various browsers, then I don’t think it’s a huge problem.
#2 by Anuj Gakhar on June 8, 2008 - 9:17 pm
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Glen,
I understand your concern. There are still some corporate users who dont have permissions to be able to upgrade their browsers. I have myself come across such users. But My belief is that the the decision makers should decide to upgrade in this case.
And its possible to support IE6, but is it worth it ? Once you spend a good few weeks getting your head around CSS, you get used to the stuff thats required to get IE6 compatibility but why do we have to spend those few weeks in first place? After all, those are bugs in IE6, not the bugs in CSS.
In my case, I would spend a week to get a simple site functional with backend, another 2 days for the CSS to get it work in FF and IE 7 and another 1-2 days specially to make sure it works in IE6 as well.
Having said all that, IE6 should not be used according to me. But I could be wrong.
#3 by Anuj Gakhar on June 10, 2008 - 9:52 am
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nice post here on the same subject http://ajaxwidgets.com/Blogs/thomas/the_entire_web_is__best_viewed.bb
#4 by hb on July 28, 2008 - 8:13 pm
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I’ve stumbled across your blog looking for “ColdFusion” and “Internet Explorer problems”.
I’m responsible for the ColdFusion part of a website, and the developer for the graphic design part. The developer gave me a template that looked good, but broke in IE6 when I added the ColdFusion portion. (It looks good in Firefox). It looks like the broken part has to do with some sections moving to the wrong place when run under ColdFusion and viewed in Internet Explorer. Is this similar to your “box model” problem? If they added a new would that fix it?
I don’t really know css yet, but I’m having to learn fast to try to diagnose their problems.
#5 by Anuj Gakhar on July 29, 2008 - 8:19 am
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@hb, ColdFusion wouldnt break anything in the design, its a scriping language that makes your statis pages dynamic. So looks like you have some cfquery tags or some cfoutput tags or any tag for that matter, that generates HTML tags on the fly, which is generating some bad markup which is probably why your design is broken. Its also worth debugging your HTML using Firebug or Debugbar to find out whats causing the issue.
#6 by hb on July 30, 2008 - 7:57 pm
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Aha! I discovered the problem. ColdFusion was putting in a comment referencing the application.cfm file that was up a directory before the developer’s <!DOCTYPE html business.
I copied the application.cfm into the same directory and deleted out some comments and now IE6 is (mostly) happy. It still does some bad things, but I worked around them.
Thanks for replying to me, Anuj!
#7 by Anuj Gakhar on July 31, 2008 - 8:57 am
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@hb, Glad you got it sorted out.