The IE6 Equation
24ways.org
24ways.org
I am an entrepreneur and a bit of a python hacker but am new to web development as a craft. It was a skill developed from the necessity of a self-funded startup I co-founded.
Wasn't the web supposed to be accessible to all? WTF was Microsoft thinking when they came out with that stinking piece of turd called IE6 and why haven't they killed the beast by now? Instead of killing a plague like IE6 they are killing a solid operating system called Windows XP to be replaced by another Windows Vista ME (at least that's what it feels like).
Sorry for the rant but it's late and I don't like web browsers anymore.
It's funny you criticise Vista when the reason that you still have to develop for IE6 is because of the huge unprecedented success of XP. IE6 has been the XP browser since it came out. The fact is that if Vista had been a bigger success, an OS that ships with IE7, IE6 would be less of an issue. The "plague" was actually caused by what you praise in the next sentence. They're unlikely to stop supporting IE6 until they stop supporting updates to XP since it's XP's default browser.
I must be doing something right, because while there's usually something to fix, it seldom takes more than a few minutes (in my experience building templates over the past few years). Recently, the nastiest bugs I find are in IE7. They defy classification...there's some weird voodoo going on in that browser.
I think most of the IE6 hate articles out there are from new web developers or from coders who rely too heavily on complicated CSS which makes debugging utter hell.
For me, as a designer, the lack of alpha transparency support is annoying indeed, but it's pretty rare that a design absolutely requires true alpha transparency. Usually you can ape it during slicing, unless the "below" elements move, in which case I'll look to SuperSleight and what not.
Has any tried using that JS file in production? Recommended?
But the problem at hand isn't people using IE6 at home, there's a lot of companies that will not allow upgrades to even IE7. Somebody, either Mozilla, Google, whatever, needs to implement the features enterprise values most, and then advertise the hell out of it.
There's a business idea for somebody willing to take it: Enterprise Browsers. They pay you for support, updates, and insurance that their legacy apps still work. If, for any reason at all, many PHBs see free as 'cheap, inefficient, and worthless'.
I think the cheapest way to run an IE6 application will be to keep using IE6, for as long as Microsoft is willing to collect the license revenue on WinXP or whatever.
I tried using Dean Edwards's IE7 script, but our client's computers were sooo old that their browsers would actually freeze! But on computers that were relatively new (just not ancient), it worked almost perfectly. Just had to add one or two star HTML hacks and everything looked the same as in Firefox/Safari.
The idea is good but the implementation is terrible.