When I set off redesigning this website I had plans to make it the most accessible website across all browsers. How things change. Call it laziness or call it ignorance but I prefer to call it a duty towards web designers. For the last two years working at The Lancashire Evening Post, I have spent significant time looking for hacks and workarounds for ie6 such as png fixes and multiple style sheets.
Unfortunately, The Lancashire Evening Post receives around 60% of there traffic from visitors still using Internet Explorer 6. Although much of my site is ie6 compliant, some of it is not. And that is by choice. Repeated transparent pngs are not hackable so a gif replacement was in order, some kooky margins here and there but nothing too dramatic, but i feel confident that any readers i’m trying to attract to my site will already be using at least ie7, FireFox or Safari.
As web designers, we are wasting too much of our time hacking around to make our websites look good in crap ‘n old browsers when really we should be concentrating on making our users upgrade to available newer and better browsers. I’m not completely ignorant to the fact that many users are abit scared and confused into installing new browsers. I too remember when I had my first computer and didn’t see the need to upgrade any software, what’s not broke, don’t fix it, but it should be our challenge to get users to upgrade.
As a first step, i’m going to start by adding a conditional statement in my CSS that detects any browser still using ie6 which in turn will place a graphic in the header encouraging an upgrade. Not much, but it’s a start…
Amen…
But the IE6 battle will never end until Windows XP is killed off. Microsoft ships Service Pack 3 versions of Windows XP with IE6 preloaded. If only Microsoft FORCED an upgrade to IE7, the issue would be resolved. I’ll never understand Microsoft in all it’s wisdom.
Personally, I’ve stopped worrying about IE6, although it’s not much of an issue for me anyways as far as CSS related issues go. But anyone foolish enough to use the web with IE6 deserves to see the web all screwy and also eat all that malware they’ll get.
I have to agree with Amen, a force upgrade would be one of the best solutons around, as the majority of clearence PCs from common retail stores such as PC World & Currys Digital will still contain old service packs and so ie6 will still be around for many years to come.
However this seems to simple and logical, and so i fear that this will not happen due to some silly Microsoft reason.