Most UI developers consider IE6 evil. The CSS support is less
than ideal. In fact it just plain sucks.
So there are all kinds of sites dedicated to IE hacks and
Microsoft bashing. But since 2001 (when IE6 came out) Microsoft has
improved their browser. In fact the current version 8 actually
supports all of the CSS that 6 was supposed to. Oh wait that was a
little Microsoft bashing. Sorry.
IE6 is still being used by a huge percentage of people. It
varies depending on the audience of your site. But as much as 40%
is not that unusual. This is just crazy. The problem is that the
average computer user doesn't know how to update it to a new modern
browser. In fact they don't even know that what they are using is
"old and busted".
So as a UI developer there are several things that you can do to
combat IE6.
- You can code a site to use CSS that was only supported by IE6
and forget about all the cool new innovations over the years since
2001.
- You can create different CSS for IE6 and use JavaScript to
detect the browser and load whatever is required to display your
site properly.
- You can hope some rouge developer out there creates a virus
that goes and deletes IE6 from all the computers around the
world.
- You can educate the users that come to your site that they are
using an old browser.
Here at UIFreak we have decided to take the higher road and just
do number four.
To assist with this we use an out of the box jQuery plug-in that
was created for just this one purpose. It is called jReject.
The plug-in took a total of 5 minutes to implement, like most
jQuery plug-ins. The hard part was finding a computer that still
had IE6 on it to test the site. The average computer geek hasn't
used IE6 in years. So we ended up having to create a clean Windows
XP virtual to do the testing. But now we have a nice solution to
tell the person that they are using a really old browser and
provides links to several modern browsers to let them upgrade.
Now if every site had a similar solution in place, we could rid
the Internet of this obvious evil!!