July 27, 200917 yr I'm still so new at web design and I'm really discouraged every time i create something and then view it in IE7 to see all my work undone by this crap browser. I'm attempting my first paid design project for a small law firm here in New York, and I know that this firm and anyone who may view their site will probably be viewing through IE7. According to this site about 33% of internet viewers use IE6 and 7, and only a tiny portion are using 8. It's great to see so many people on Firefox, but I just know that the demographic I need to be catering to, particularly on this project, will most likely be in the IE realm. How much longer will designers and developers have to put up with this crap? What is an aspiring designer to do in the meantime? Code the website twice? Once for proper browsers and again for IE? I can't wait until IE is dead and gone.
July 27, 200917 yr IE6 will be around for many years yet, mainly in corporate environments where they are slow to upgrade. IE is still the most common browser in use and support for standards in IE7/8 is far better than IE6 so you shouldn't have many issues at all. IE6 isn't that difficult to cater for, you can either write an IE6 specific stylesheet or write cross browser compatible CSS in your main stylesheet. You might have noted that Youtube has now dropeed "support" for IE6. This doesn't mean that IE6 users won't be able to use Youtube, rather if they do use IE6 not all features may be available/visible and some things might not work as expected.
August 6, 200917 yr If I where still doing websites I wouldn't support IE6 unless the client had a very specific need for it. Time to let that old dog die. That's not to say that IE6- users would not get to see any content - I'd just serve them a plain document. (Actually, I would probably set up a very simple CSS and feed that as a completely naked HTML page would just feel ... very naughty....) And I'd possibly add a little note to affected users with the help of conditional comments. IE6 users will be feeling the age of the browser, they stick with it either because they don't care or some sysadmin had forced it upon them. either way, they can't expect the full experience.
October 13, 200916 yr I think it depends who your target market is - I mean I know quite a few "silver surfers" who haven't even upgraded their anti-virus for a couple of years let alone their web browser. So, if you are designing a site in mind for that demographic then i think you (reluctantly) still have to consider older browser versions in mind.
October 14, 200916 yr I don't care to check my work in ie6, only when a client requires it. Let die IE6. It is very old browser. But IE7 worth an attention still though.
January 10, 201016 yr I still check in ie6 Only because I used to get people saying that it looked different - and the reason was ie6! Brian
January 11, 201016 yr it won't be gone until companies start to upgrade their systems, unfortunately if they have tech that was developed to run with IE6 only then upgrading becomes a costly problem... i still design for IE6, though I don't think 7 is that big of an issue as IE6 is, it can be a pain but as long as a large number of people still use it we'll have to continue to design for it
January 19, 201016 yr A lot of template websites are nolonger supporting IE6, as for me i usually install a warning plugin. Alerting IE6 user to upgrade their browsers if they wanna view the website properly.
January 21, 201016 yr yeah with growing public news about IE it might help. The problem is that the vast majority of internet users don't know what a browser is, so IE will still be popular even with the breaking news that IE is crap and full of security holes.
January 22, 201016 yr The whole point of a website is to communicate/sell/provide something for an audience. If that audience uses IE6 and your website doesn't work for them then you haven't done your job. Simple as. I lose maybe 15% of my time (and therefore company profits) making sites look reasonable in IE6. But it's part of the job. If I completed an e-commerce site and 33% of people couldn't checkout that's a hell of a lot of lost earnings for my client. I think it's horrendous how many people don't check their work in IE6. It's not up to web developers to decide they can't be arsed to support a browser anymore. Clients pay us to do a job and I for one am sure as hell I'm gonna do it properly. On the other hand, my personal technical blog doesn't have all it's bells and whistles or look pixel perfect in IE6, and that's OK because I know my target audience doesn't use IE6. I've still checked it though, just in case, and implemented fixes where it drastically increases the user experience, because it's what I do.
January 24, 201016 yr Well THIS pretty much sums-up the IE6 issue and a whole lot more about far too many designers! IE6 is an utter bad of spanners and it should burn - but then again so should an awful lot of websites out there coded by so called 'designers'. But, if you are ever building a site for business - either corporate B2B or mass-market B2C then you just can't ignore IE6. It doesn't have to look the SAME in IE6, but it shouldn't break or stop working. Graceful something or other springs to mind here... I'm sure it's a buzzword! Just to drive the point home again... start with the content, get the basics right - try to style HTML elements not fit HTML elements to a Photoshop image and a whole heap of your problems go away. Not to say that IE6 and other browser 'quirks' don't cause problems... just, compared to other jobs - web design is a total and utter piece of p***! Really. Full stop. No arguments. I said no arguments - stop it! Edited January 24, 201016 yr by wizely
January 24, 201016 yr Forgot to add to my rant - the day that browsers all play nicely, there are decent agreed standards, there are next-generation WYSIWYG editors etc. web design will be for the talented graphic designers, UX experts and developers... anyone will be able to bedroom Photoshop a decent enough site! PS. In case anyone hasn't noticed my faux ranting is designed to spice up yet another debate on IE6!
January 24, 201016 yr wizely trying to spice up an argument when did you start doing that? I agree with Eris point, like with any job there are parts that you like and parts that you don't like, IE6 just happens to be a part that is disliked, but that doesn't mean that you can just ignore it. If you get paid to do a job you owe it to your clients to do it correctly, there are some designers that charge more to do IE6 fixes which I really don't understand as IE6 is part of their job and they should do it anyway. There is nothing wrong with using all the bells and whistles for modern browsers, but let a site downgrade so that it is still usable in browsers, or with JS disabled or with flash not installed. While I agree with wizely's point about styling html elements, I will add that there is nothing wrong with building a website concept (note the word concept) in a graphics/photo editor, but always looks at your concept and try and figure out how you would build the site in html, not how you would slice up the image to form the website, there is a big difference.
January 24, 201016 yr While I agree with wizely's point about styling html elements, I will add that there is nothing wrong with building a website concept (note the word concept) in a graphics/photo editor Dizi agreeing with Wizely when did you start doing that?! Agree with you on the concept thing... didn't mean to imply that mock-ups or concepts couldn't be done in a graphics package.
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