IE6 could you go away now . . . please?
I haven’t posted in a while since I was in the middle of a big public release of The Web Archiving Service a couple of weeks ago.
I had pushed myself pretty hard to get things done early and one of the big last-minute changes was a cosmetic makeover on a set of our pages from a graphic designer. The design needed to be pretty much “pixel perfect” and that’s when I remembered why I hate IE6.
After fighting some bad javascript libraries for rounded corners and fixing things up, all the browsers on my computer seemed to pretty much agree with each other in the way they laid things out. Even Safari on Mac and on an iPhone didn’t do anything crazy.
Then I found out we’d be supporting IE 6. Thats when I rediscovered that it completely destroyed css standards. It did retarded things like doubling my margins or making fixed size divs expand when they shouldn’t. I had to search around for all the known problems and the random hacks that fix or work around them. Fully 1/3 of my time in creating the new layout was dedicated to fixing IE 6 bugs. No other commonly-used browser causes so many problems.
That experience hit home the fact that IE6 should be very, very dead by now, though 15% of people still seem to be using it. Yikes.
Even Google seems to be about done with IE6
I’m not the only person who hates IE 6. It seems many big-name sites such as Facebook are now telling people to move on from IE 6 in order to use their services. It’s about time. This bad, buggy 8-year-old dinosaur of a browser needs to go away now.
If you want to help push the reluctant Luddites along, Michael Garmahis has some suggestions on how you can have your web pages encourage them to move along after 8 years of stagnating with IE6.
If you’re really missing IE6 and all it’s problems, you can always use the IE6IFY bookmarklet which should successfully remind you of “the good old days.”
Maybe the upcoming release of HTML 5 will be the last nail in the IE6 coffin. I can only hope so.