My fellow developers out there will well understand the IE6 support issues.
IE6 is now an old browser. It was released in August 2001 so it is a whooping 8 years old. Over the past 8 years lots of things have changed, the way websites are written and developed has moved on yet for most designers IE6 continues to be a pain in the bum to support.
The reason that IE6 is such a pain is because
- It’s old and does not support lots of the lovely new features that newer browsers do. For example transparent PNG graphics are often used to create shadows and round corners. These do not work as well for IE6.
- IE6 has lots of bugs
- When we do our testing the more browsers we have to support the harder it is to test and the more time consuming.
Up until now we have always tried very hard to ensure that all our website look equally good on all browsers. We have made the decision today to downgrade our support for IE6. This means that we will still ensure that all our websites work on IE6 but we will not worry too much about making it look as good as in newer browsers.
By supporting IE6 fully webside designers often end up crippling the design so that “one size fits all” – we want to move forwards.
This will save us some time, you some money and of course will enable us to concentrate on adding new features that are supported by newer browsers. The end result will be that your website will look better in newer browsers.
What do you think? What level of support do you require for IE6?
