Taking a Stand Against IE6

As I’m sure you’re aware Internet Explorer 6 has been on the steady decline over the past few years thanks to the introduction of a slew of new browsers. In New Zealand the IE6 share is around the 5% mark — and dropping steadily1. As a result we’ve started to build sites slightly differently here at work…

Less time and effort is spent trying to get IE6 to render the same as other, more modern, browsers. I know this is a technique that a fair few people have adopted already. If I had my way I would have been doing it this way since the first version of Firefox hit the shelves. Sadly, a number of our clients are the unfortunate bunch who are stuck in corporate IT hell — which means a lot of them are still using IE6.

Over the past few months we’ve decided to start building new sites using HTML5 and CSS3. What this means is that our sites don’t look the same in all browsers. And that’s fine. We make sure we put in place the usual javascript hacks to get things to render in older browsers but with IE6 no extra effort is applied to get the layouts perfect. We’ve included a small, friendly message to IE6 users explaining to them that their browser is out of date.

I’m guessing at this point you might be wondering how this helps those clients in IT hell. They can’t upgrade their browsers, they just have to wait for their IT departments to roll out new versions of IE…

Sigh.

As a couple of people pointed out on twitter yesterday, it’s about time we take a stand and make the web ugly for those users still stuck using a browser that’s almost a decade old.

So — IT departments across New Zealand: wake the fuck up! Your users require a new browser! A browser that isn’t riddled with security flaws. A browser that understands basic CSS2.1 selectors. A browser that doesn’t require at least 45 KB more javascript to make it almost work as well as all other modern browsers.

To everyone else who can upgrade, you should upgrade. There are loads of excellent free alternatives to IE6 which I’ve listed below.

This is based on stats from Trademe. This seemed like a good source as they’re one of — if not — the largest website in New Zealand. ↩