SaveTheDevelopers.org AKA Save Me From the Pain of IE6
SaveTheDevelopers.org :: Making The Web A Better Place
Say no to IE 6! Our current campaign focuses on assisting users in upgrading their Internet Explorer 6 web browser. This campaign will result in former IE 6 users having a more enjoyable experience on the web while (hopefully) creating a less stressful and complicated environment for web developers by hastening the retirement of an outdated browser.
Say it loud!
I've been writing about the slow adoption rate for a while now and it's still a source of frustration. Over the past month this site has seen 9,078 visitors using IE6.* Which is precisely 9,078 too many.
Honestly? In some sense it's a positive number, as the overall percentage of users on IE6 is shrinking. It's still not shrinking fast enough, however, so sentiments like the above speak to me like a call from up on high.
Sure, my site (and really all of my sites) looks fine in IE6, but it's still a pain to have to support it, even if it's just the extra bytes I have to serve other browsers (in the form of conditional comments.) And really, being the stickler for good experiences that I am, I still have to test and bug-fix for IE6 whenever I add new features or styles. Supporting two version of IE is awful, especially when one is so much better than the other.
I won't even get started on the issues at work.
Okay, maybe a little.
While I've got a hip, upgrading crowd that visits this site, the people we build for at work are generally running old, locked down machines running whatever browser their IT department wants to support. Care to guess what browser that might be?
Yeah.
IE6.
*sob*
*compared to 32,372 using Firefox and 15,385 using Internet Explorer 7.
http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
Helps ease the pain..
Only problems is that it still doesn’t really fix PNG24s, You can place them without using the Internet Explorer 'AlphaImageLoader' … You simply just have to add *-trans.png on the end of your PNG files, but You still can't tile them or place them using the background CSS tag.
It also lets you put pseudo elements on all tags not just anchor tags..
Their's a few bits more.. but I'll let you have a read.
Dean Edwards is awesome. I've never actually used the IE7 script, but it's a fantastic piece of code.
It might actually be a way forward for me as, up until I now I'd be hesitant to add the 11k on top of a site when I possess the knowledge to bug fix specific issues (crafting cleaner, lower performance cost solutions). But as I move IE6 down the order of preference in terms of performance it might save me some headaches in terms of hand crafting solutions and still allow me to "support" IE6 well into the future.
Yeah I know what you’re saying, 11k at the top is a pain… I try to keep out as many external links of the page as it loads..
But the JS link is in a IE ‘if’ statement so will be ignored by all modern browsers anyway, and If your using IE6 then my mind set is I spent an extra couple of hours 'fixing' it for IE6 then you can wait an extra couple of seconds.
The only thing I’ve found with the IE7 Script is some of the …. Shall we say … hacks is used no longer work..
Ie.
Html > Body #div
{
/* Some styles */
}
Will now be read by IE6, which in theory shouldn’t matter as the script should ‘Fix’ most of your problems… But there have been a few instances when this hasn’t been the case. And I haven’t been able to use my normal selector hacks to get round the problems…
Saying that most of the solutions I have came up with have fallen back on having a well structured CSS file.. ( For those of you not already in the know ) I mean:
1. Rest your styles to 0
2. Build up a new cross browser default
3. Construct your website using and styling them till you get your desired look.
Bah! … dam your site stripping my tags
correction:
3. Construct your website using divs and styling them till you get your desired look.