cristian.gimmicklab.com Web Standards, Semantic Interfaces and Web Developing

Cristian in CSS, Development

March 13, 2009

At our main site we are not IE6 friendly so if you try to access you will get an explanation page and different links to upgrade your browser. Since it’s our site we can decide whatever we like, and here we had chosen a radical approach blocking page views trying to educate our clients convincing them for an upgrade.

For our clients site we take a different approach. The site should run and performance as it’s supposed to but we stopped spending hours and hours trying to force IE6 to style the page correctly. No more pixel perfection for Internet Explorer, no spending 10% of project time fixing IE6 bugs, not anymore.

From now we are going to put a conditional comments for IE6 inviting them to upgrade. They still will get the content and maybe they won’t enjoy a perfectly aligned layout, or see a column rarely padded… anyway if they are using this browser it’s because they don’t care and if they don’t care they don’t even realize a CSS bug.

Here it is the snippet that we will use to show a upgrade notice. It’s a conditional comment that will apply to IE6 users and some CSS to style it:

<!--[if IE 6]>
	<div id="ie6">
        <p>Upgrade notice and link to suggested browsers here</p>
        </div>
<![endif]-->

#ie6 {
	background: #fffbcc;
	padding: 5px 10px;
	border: 1px solid #e6db55;
        color: #000;
}

Even though it’s still a point if you try to degrade gracefully, so if a feature is not available the should be still able to read and interact with the content.

Everyone who works on web development knows how hard it’s dealing with a different box model, floating rules, line-heights and many others so I will not complain about anymore. The point here is that IE6 is old (8 years old), insecure, slow and using it your are missing some killing experiences that the modern web can offer you.

37Signals stopped offering IE6 support last year and developers from Sweden and Norway are already using this approach, in the spanish web there are also some examples. In the next months with the new release of Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft will stop to offer IE6 support. So if this is the picture why you are already using this old browser?

If you are, try to download some reliables browsers to enjoy a modern web experience. My favorites are Safari, fast and with the nicest rendering machine, and Firefox, no limits to extend it with the most killers features.

• Tags: CSS, IE6