“Bring down Internet Explorer 6″ has been a bit of a buzzword in our office of late. For the uninitiated, IE6 was the “de facto” web browser for many years, thanks to its shipping with Windows 2000, and even today, it is estimated that 20% of web users are viewing the web on IE6.
“So what?” you may ask. Fact is though, IE6 does many things in shockingly non-standard ways. For web pages to display correctly on IE6 as well as on more modern, standards-compliant web browsers, web coders often have to effectively write their style sheets (the instructions to the browser on how to display the content) twice.
Not only that, but the ways and means of getting around IE6’s shortcomings have become increasingly long-winded, bizarre and obscure – a fact highlighted by our trainee Fran’s absolute hatred of IE6. As if having a six-week crash course in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, .htaccess and the lot isn’t enough, she’s got to learn what can politely be described as a set of “bizarre hacks” but more correctly as “gobbledygook” just to get her web pages to work properly.
The time and money being wasted worldwide by design firms and their clients coping with this issue must be huge. With sites like Facebook declaring that they are no longer offering the best version of their site to IE6 users, and .net (the UK web industry magazine) launching a campaign along these lines too, the time may indeed be ushering in when Internet Explorer 6 can finally be “put to bed”.
Unfortunately though, if we want to produce universally acceptable web pages, we are going to have to continue to apply these “hacks” and tricks, at least for now. After all, if you are using the web on a Windows 2000 computer in your office and your company won’t invest in new computers and operating systems capable of running more modern browsers (Windows 2000 can’t run IE7 or IE8), then it’s hardly your fault is it?
Then again, maybe you shouldn’t be on Facebook at work anyway… 
Tags: IE6, Internet Explorer 6