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knew while making this website that it would not support ie6, but I carried on regardless because I thought that it was out of date.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I understand that IE6 is technically not yet out of date.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!

Yeaterday I met a guy browsing the Linux magazines in easons. We started talking about Linux and he highly recomended Mandriva. I had been using Fedora for a month at that stage and to be honest I didn’t think that much of it. The man managed to convince me to buy the Linux Format magazine which included a live version of Mandriva.

When I got home I stuck in the CD, not expecting much since I was disapointed with both Fedora and Ubuntu. Oh My God it is brilliant!! Mandriva is the best operating system that I have ever stumbled upon! Absolutly brilliant! It combines all the good visual aspects of Microsoft’s Window Vista and the good old back end of Linux! The graphical ‘flowing’ widgets and the availability to completly customise everything visually creates a great user friendly (and more importandly Windows user friendly) interface.

So I set about getting rid of Fedora. I only had 12 GB hard drive space reserved for Fedora but I was so impressed by Mandriva that I managed to clear 34 GB for it! The OS is now installed and almost fully functional.

I have to say I am surprised that a Linux distribution has finally achieved what I have been waiting for. The things that I want in Linux are finally available, which are:

• The graphical, ease of use, user friendly aspects of a Windows distribution. Mandriva in my opinion has achieved this, and to my great suprise it has out-done any Windows OS that I have ever used in this section in particular.
• No Viruses. This has allways been available – but without the other points it means nothing.
• The ability to code properly, I have learned the hard way that this isn’t possible on Windows.
• Oh and everything is easy! Like MySQL for example, i found it impossible to set it up on Windows without using PHP MyAdmin.

Over all i think Mandriva is brilliant and I cant wait to get it working properly. The only one problem that I did find with it is that my 02 3G modem won’t work properly on it. I have found some articles to hack the config files, which I intent to do as soon as I find out how to log in as root!!! oh it will all work eventually…

Just to note I got The Strats website up at http://www.thestrats.com please check it out and give me a review here or preferably at http://www.webdesignforum.com/5904-review-my-new-site.html#post22842