Web Design

Just Die Already!

August 16th, 2010 by Matt Haff

It’s one thing not to hate people, it’s another thing altogether to hate computer software. It’s been 10 years since Internet Explorer 6 came out and it just seems like it won’t go away! Sure the percentage of IE6 visitors is becoming less and less but on a site that gets roughly 25k visitors a month almost 1,000 of them are still using IE6?! Really?

No this isn’t going to just be a rant about IE6, however I do think that every web developer has a God given right to do so about once a month…This is to challenge the people at Microsoft, or whoever it is that runs the IE dev team. Here’s a question, and it’s not rhetorical. Why do we not see people browsing with 3 earlier versions of Safari, Firefox or Chrome? It’s because anytime you start one of those browsers and they are outdated they remind you to upgrade. Internet Explorer for some unknown reason doesn’t do that, they don’t care what version you’re running…why would they?

Perhaps we as web developers can give people the hard shove that they need to get off IE6. Fastest way to do this is put conditional comments that say “If IE6 don’t show the website at all and instead show a sentence that tells them to upgrade their browser already, they’re 10 years behind”. I just don’t see that going over well when the client finds out that’s what happens when one of their customers on an older browser comes to their site. Instead, I’m suggesting that we don’t worry about hacking our beautiful CSS to make a site look good in IE6, if it’s jacked up…let it be. Only support the functionality of the site, not the design. I charge my clients extra if they want it to look decent in IE6, it’s outdated, doesn’t follow standards, full of bugs & security issues, etc.