Try to access photo diary service Momentile via IE6 and you’ll find yourself staring at this fantastic cartoon. No doubt about it, Microsoft’s aging browser isn’t welcome at this party!
Click the image for a better look. You can find out about the making of the cartoon at Robot Johnny’s blog.
Unprofessional imo. All content should be accessible. Andy Clarke from a beutiful web has an answer or those unwilling to debug for ie6 http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/universal_internet_explorer_6_css/
But an ie6 stylesheet is usually only a few lines. Sure I wish it would go away, but as far a sI know 1 in 5 still use it. Would you turn away 1 in 5 of your potential customers?
Hey, what’s IE7 doing up there in the treehouse with the cool kids? I just remember last night, wenn i tried to figure out how to teach him to display correct margins for – Elements that contained ‘s that were styled with display: block; ^^
given the logos chosen and the lack of chrome, it is obvious it is opera 9.0, safari 3.0, firefox 3.0.0 in the tree house along with IE7.
initially after a revamp/update of our site not so long ago, we stopped officially supporting IE6. we added a note telling people they should upgrade at a minimum to IE7 or better still, they should get themselves a ‘real browser’ complete with links to download Safari, Firefox or Chrome.
With the exception of the gallery, the site still worked for those that insisted on using IE6 however a couple of things made us bite the bullet and reintroduce IE6 compliance.
1. We looked at our Google Analytics stats and as much as it pains me to say it, some 70% of visitors to the site were using IE6. To dismiss 70% of our potential customers was a mistake.
2. We recently received an email from someone that couldn’t order via the online shop because for some reason, it was borked when using IE6 (this wasn’t our intention, somehow a recent change had messed things up for IE6). I emailed the person back and thanked her for drawing our attention to the issue and that we would endeavor to fix it that night. I added that if she didn’t want to wait for that to happen, she could always use an alternative browser. I may have well been speaking Martian to her – she replied saying that IE6 was the only browser she had and when I suggested she download a different (and compliant) browser, the reaction I got was comparable to if I had told her I wanted to eat her babies. This was the eye opening moment for me – whilst all my friends and colleagues for the most part are tech savvy (to varying degrees), the majority of the world quite simply don’t know anything beyond what was installed on their Dell when they bought it 5 years ago. They don’t twitter, they don’t read blogs and they certainly wouldn’t know what an RSS feed was. All they know is that IE6 lets them use Facebook and Myspace and access Hotmail.
Please don’t think i’m suggesting such people are lesser in any way, rather that for the most part they don’t want nor need to know anything above and beyond the dreadful IE6.
As much as I would like to lead the fight against the total craptacular dinosaur that is IE6, from a commercial point of view, it’s suicide to do so for now.