The war on IE6

It seems that the decline of IE6 has plateued at around 15-20% which has brought frustration to many web developers around the world. For nearly a year now I stopped supporting IE6 on my personal sites but 99% of my work is for clients who do not want to exclude what is a significant portion of their audience. This has lead to a signifucant portiin of development time taken up by finding hacks for IE6 or worse still dropping features that IE6 won’t support. Most clients wont accept that IE6 users should have a degraded experience and would rather lose a feature than have it only available to other browsers!

CNET Video page was a beast to get working in IE6 as even when it looked perfect scrollong down would cause divs to partially collapse and colours to flicker. IE6 also had issues with Ajax loading in content after the page had been rendered and wouldn’t expand boxes to accomodate the content. The hacks were ugly and made me hate IE6 more than ever. Note the page has been redesigned since these issues but I imagine many haslayout and delayed loading issues still remain.

Until IE6 is gone this is just a daily problem for developers and with the failure of Vista and the apathy/ignorance of users and corp IT departments something more drastic was needed. .net magazines started a campaign a couple of months ago to unite developers in putting IE6 to the sword. Check out bring down ie6 for the details. It has caused some controvecy as many developers feel that if your weblogs and clients say that IE6 is still important we should support it. And to be fair some users have no choice. However, rather than just allowing a page to appear broken in IE6 by boldly stating the reasons why you will recieve a degraded experience if isong IE6 as mobile me and google mail have done you both educate the ignorant users as to the existance of alternatives and irritate corporate IT departments into action. When the company MD cant access certain sites or keeps getting alerted to reduce performance, features and security because of his old browser it wont be easy for the IT department to make excuses for having firefox or IE7 on the users systems.

I think it could be taken 2 steps further. Educate users that you dont need admin rights to install firefox. In fact the first time I used firefox at work I installed it on a memory stick. Scandisk have memory sticks with U3 feature that runs several apps directly from the usb dongle. It’s self contained and so can be taken with you and run on any pc. However, i found memory stick run apps a little sluggish especially on scandisk dongles (I only use corsair now) so installing in the My Documenta folder is my usual recommendation. Where I work I am surrounded by IE6 users, all of them hate it but felt they had no option. A quick demo of a My Documents install and everyone’s converted. If this was added to the advise on upgradeing I am sure uptake would be higher. Note, installation of flash and java support for these browsers does require admin rights.

The next step would be to treat IE6 like a mobile browser. A mobile browser has reduced features and performance so has a cut down version of the site with just the essentials (i know there is more to it than that, screen res, bandwidth etc). So my IE6 site would have the content but not the look and feel of the full site. Again this will probably just be on my personal sites and for pro-bono clients, for the clients that pay the bills the best I can hope for is to include a message advising to upgrade their browser and link to the campaign page.

The more sites/developers that get on board the more effective this will be. Hopefully boosted by a succesful Windows 7 launch and MS dropping support for IE6 will see the browser retired for good.

Responsibilities as Designers/Developers

This post was prompted by reading a feaure by Andy Rutledge in .net magazine. First let me start by saying - it was an excellent column. If you haven’t read it already I suggest picking up a copy of .net as it’s a particularly good issue this month.

I digress, the article discussed Back end Developers not keeping to standards or producing poor quality work. He suggested that developers that do not understand semantics and correct use of html and css should be fired! The entire article was very strong, but I think this was necessary to get the point across.

What I wanted to comment on was the admonition for front-end designers to report bad programmers to the boss if they are producing bad code or messing up your standards compliant code because they don’t understand correct mark-up. In fact Andy said we were obligated to do so.
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A Podcast Less Ordinary

This last week I’ve been re-discovering podcasting. In the past I’ve listened to gaming podcasts but until now hadn’t used the technology for anything but entertainment.

Now I’ve discovered a whole world of informative podcast featuring some of the greatest minds in web design/development.

I highly recommended checking out odeo.com - although not design specific it hosts many web dev podcasts including an excellent interview of Dave Shea (the creator of csszengarden) by Scott Fergette - check it out here.

The quality of the podcasts vary greatly from the surreal or outright nonsense to goldmines of tips and ideas.

I hope to start a podcast of my own once I get regular enough with my blogging. =watch this space=

Dave Long