Why I miss IE6

The author misses IE6 because it was the dominant browser and he/she could code for it and call it a day? Might as well claim you miss Lynx and the days where shelling out to gopher links was so easy because it was one command in emacs.

Blame Microsoft - They went for exclusive Windows support and were pretty nasty in screwing with standards to force people there.

If they kept with cross-platform support (they dropped Mac IE as of version 5.2...) and played a bit nicer with standards (non MS standards were against their lock-in strategy), I'm sure the market would not have been as fed-up with them .

Not talking techies here, just users, if things just worked for most of em then they would have been happy. But as MS excluded IE tech on non MS phones, Apples and other computing devices that access the internet they started excluding themselves as well.

The author ignores the idea that his websites don't need to look identical in every browser, and probably can't. If you're getting bent out of shape over the limits of styling an option tag, you're doing it wrong.

Give older browsers simpler stylesheets. Build your site to gracefully degrade without javascript and browser errors won't come back to bite you. We have a varied and rapidly changing browser ecosystem - you need to change your design patterns.

in summary,

"I kinda miss the days when IE6 was The Browser For Them All."

"I have a freaking ton of customers running older browsers"

It is difficult to develop when rendering on all browsers is different.

I do agree with him, one platform that did what we told it to. All hacks were documented.

However I don't miss it. Plenty of capable platforms out there that can help build browser compatible sites quickly. Besides if you have to resort to bold inside an option tag, your design has some other flaws.

My favorite is still web kit. I hope it gets more share.

Edit: try putting image tags inside option. I believe only FF renders it. I could be wrong though. It's been a while I've worked this deep with HTML. The DTD never allowed yet FF renders it.

Edit: I was right, he is using option tag to do something it is not supposed to. http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/option.html I suppose he missed IE6 for a reason ;)

According to Microsoft's stats, there actually aren't many people running IE6 in North America and Europe.

http://ie6countdown.com

Microsoft is trying to get sites involved with getting old IE users to upgrade.

http://ie6countdown.com/join-us.html

It might even be worthwhile for Microsoft to have a generic campaign where they encourage all users on a given platform to upgrade to the latest IE possible. XP to IE8, Vista and Win7 to IE9, and next year Win7 to IE10.

Constantly reminding people they are running an older browser can only help.