Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 – The bain of every web developers life.

As I have mentioned before I recently developed a site for The Strats. I knew while making this website that it would not support ie6, but I carried on regardless because I thought that it was out of date. Apparently not. Once the site was completed I got ‘the piss ripped out of me’ by people reviewing the site simply because of its lack of ie6 support. Basically i would have to completely re-design the site just to support this one browser… which I am frankly not prepared to do! Thankfully I found a JavaScript library that makes IE6 appear to have near native png support, but why bother?

If you are not aware of ie6 and its terrible over all performance then I have listed some of the facts for you.
1. IE6 was released in 2001. When it was released it failed to comply with at the time modern style rules, and is still behind in how to implement CSS 2.0.
2. IE6 is very unsecure, loads of bugs were found when it was released, and many of them have still not been patched. Here is a nice site that lists all of the bug fixes that they had to make for IE7: Feature Changes for IE7.

The main point that concerns web developers is the lack of compatibility with CSS style rules. This does have a massive affect on the amount of work that has to be done to display a webpage properly. In most websites you can see multipal stylesheets being used, usually a stylesheet specifically for IE6. Also to fix most of the problems with the browser people have written hacks. It makes you wonder once again, why bother?

I also have a list of the best IE6 hate sites… just in case you get a bit carried away and decide to get involved!
1. 100 reasons to hate IE6.
2. 6 Reasons why IE6 must die.
3. Dear IE6, i hate you.
4. 50 reasons to club IE6 to death.
5. Trash all IE6 hacks.
6. I hate IE6 Dot Com
7. Free the web.

I understand that IE6 is technically not yet out of date. About 42% of people use IE7, with its percentage growing slowly. About 32% use IE6, with its percentage decreasing slowly as users switch to IE7 and other browsers. The fact is that IE6 is still used by a greater percentage of people than that using firefox. In the end of the day I have concluded that a web developer is payed to do their job, which is to make a website that works. It is not up to us, as developers, to decide what we should support, we should go with the flow. Who wants to hear all these developers moaning (I’m soo contradicting myself here!) about IE6. We are getting paid, it’s not the end of the world!

Heres a link that I agree with! Stop being a dick, support IE6.

Then when I thought that I had this post all done and wrapped up…. I saw this statement that made my day! I have just taken the key point out of the article, to see it in full go to: Internet Explorer 6 – Wikipedia

“IE6 will be phased out completely in early January 2009”

I cant wait… Only two months and we can forget about IE6!