Comments on: How I Might Deal with IE6

By: stephen megitt

stephen megitt — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:16:19 +0000

I love the fact that this conversation is taking place. I can remember when just the thought of abandoning support for IE6 was sacrilege.
The weight of Dan’s statement “When you take it [ie6] out of the picture..You can start thinking progressively” is huge.
We all want the best for our clients, but we all want to do great work that pushes the envelope (if not for the industry, then for our ego).
Getting bogged down in hacks, workarounds – no matter how elegant, bleeds the full potential of any project. without all this worry and advance preparation, suddenly, you’re free to try new things. That’s pretty great!
The only way that people will abandon their browsers is if there is trickle down effect coming from us. Of course clients will have the last word, but its up to us to at least have the discussion with them and see how amenable they are to the idea.
I LOVE the idea of showing the user the naked page with a statement telling them that they should upgrade. I do, however, find it ironic, that we are discussing the best hack or workaround to tell IE6 users that they should adopt a newer browser.
There is no question that now is the cusp of abandonment.
Thanks for bringing this up Dan!

By: TalentedMrJones

TalentedMrJones — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:55:06 +0000

IE6 has been the bane of my existence for the entirety of my 7 year web development career. Its time to give the general public a push in the right direction.
Who is the web industry? We are. Without designers and developers there would be no web.
We have the power to force audiences to use modern browsers, and we do that by saying “No. We are following web standards to the letter, and will not support a browser that doesn’t. It’s your [the user's] responsibility to upgrade your browser, and not our responsibility to continue this unhealthy enabling.”
Continuing to support antiquated browsers means continuing to hack code, and continuing to pull our hair simply because we’re following the rules.
Let’s stand together as an industry and say “NO!” to supporting browsers prior to Firefox, Safari or IE7.
Scot Jehl had it right in a very early post:

This site looks bad because you’re using IE6. Get Firefox

By: Rory Martin

Rory Martin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:00:22 +0000

Wow, I never realised you could do this with different css stylesheets for different browsers. Although its extremely annoying having to cater for these accent browsers. Thanks for the knowledge!

By: Billee D.

Billee D. — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 07:43:58 +0000

I think that serving-up a plain vanilla version of a website to IE6 is totally acceptable. The content is still usable, it just doesn’t look pretty. This is where I think that some designers fail to see the point; web sites are about information and not slick graphics. If the point of a website is to distribute information then the design is ancillary to the content, right? So what if it isn’t pretty. If it’s usable what’s the fuss about?
I have started serving naked sites to IE6 (and below) users for almost 3 months now and I tell my clients that if they want IE6 support for their new website it will cost them extra money. We did the same thing back in the NN4 days and I think that it’s time to do the same thing for IE6.
With IE8 out of beta now I think it’s time to put ol’ #6 to rest. Plus, you have to admit that there is something kind of exhilarating to designing a website and *not* having to cater to IE6. It’s downright refreshing!

By: Greg Mayer

Greg Mayer — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:58:23 +0000

I guess I’ll have to start viewing this site at home (or stop altogether).
We’re still saddled with IE6 at work (10,000+ users) and have little say in the matter. I understand that I may be the only one of them visiting this site and I also understand just how awful this browser is, but…
(And now that I’m in Preview Your Comment mode, I can’t even read the text on the buttons.)

By: Doois Tecnologia

Doois Tecnologia — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:29:10 +0000

It would be nice if we all could forget all versions of IE, but the truth is that the whole corporate world uses this bad peace of software.

By: bedroom furniture

bedroom furniture — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:51:14 +0000

with old computers running, THEY still use IE6 and their focal point of reference for your work is their own ancient browser.
From that practical point of view, there is simply not a good way to ignore the old browser compatible css approach.

By: Mark Priestap

Mark Priestap — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:32:24 +0000

A method I’ve been using lately for PNGs…
It requires extra CSS, but reduces load on IE without requiring another stylesheet. Forgive me if this has been stated elsewhere… I’m sure it has.
#header[id] { /* [id] hides style from IE6 */ background: url(/img/sometransparentimage.png); } #header { ... the rest of the styles ... }
This method will not load the image into IE6 so you don’t get nasty gray-blue backgrounds. If you don’t mind hacks you can insert the old underscore hack for IE inside the main styles if you want to give the element an opaque background.
so…
#header[id] { /* [id] hides style from IE6 */ background: url(/img/sometransparentimage.png); } #header { _background: url(/img/sometransparentimage.gif); }
This is hacky to be sure, but it does make sure that IE only downloads the GIF and everyone else only downloads the PNG.

By: Flug USA

Flug USA — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:54:55 +0000

Forget IE6! I don’t like it at all!… :-P

By: Chris Patterson

Chris Patterson — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:43:57 +0000

I agree that for some sites it's already becoming appropriate to serve IE6 users unstyled content. That's not true of the majority of sites I work on (which doesn't mean that it's not valuable to discuss techniques, as all sites will eventually hit that tipping point). I did want to throw in a CSS-only fix for alpha-transparency on IE6, though.

* html .pngfix {
zoom: 1;
behavior: expression((this.runtimeStyle.behavior="none") && (this.pngSet?this.pngSet=true:(this.nodeName == "IMG" && this.src.toLowerCase().indexOf('.png')<-1 ?  (this.runtimeStyle.backgroundImage = "none", this.runtimeStyle.filter = "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='" + this.src + "', sizingMethod='image')", this.src = "/path/to/transparent.gif") : (this.origBg = this.origBg ? this.origBg :  this.currentStyle.backgroundImage.toString().replace('url("','').replace('")',''), this.runtimeStyle.filter = "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='" + this.origBg + "', sizingMethod='" + (this.currentStyle.backgroundRepeat=='no-repeat' ? 'crop' : 'scale') +"')", this.runtimeStyle.backgroundImage = "none")),this.pngSet=true));
}

IE6 is the only browser that will ever try to apply the rule. You just need a transparent .gif, and to add the "pngfix" class to elements which need transparency. I did a writeup at http://www.openplans.org/projects/topp-design/blog/2009/01/22/design-pattern-alpha-transparency-in-ie-without-javascript/ a while back, showing some of the limitations - it's not a perfect fit for all situations, but it never hurts to have another arrow in the quiver.