Trash All IE Hacks 517
Let's admit it, we all hate Internet Explorer 6. About 80% of our CSS debug time are spend on IE6. We all know that IE6 is outdated and has horrible CSS rendering engine. However, most average Internet users haven't realized that yet. Why? Because we put our hard work on it and patch the bugs by various IE hacks. Well, it is time to do something...
Common IE hacks
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CSS Conditional comments
In order for our sites to work on specific verson of IE (due to improper CSS rendering), CSS conditional comments are used to apply special CSS specifications to fix it. If you haven't realized this yet, read the IE bug articles on positioniseverything.net (warning: you might hate IE more after you read them). -
PNG hack
As mentioned early, IE6 is outdated and doesn't support PNG alpha transparency. In order to display PNG (with alpha transparency) properly in IE6 or older version, we use this hack.Aleksey asked on "Simple Double Quotes":
"Hello Nick. I see some bug.
The Close button ( X ) don’t transparent. Test on IE6 and MyIE."My response:
"Yes, I know the PNGs don't display probably in IE6. But guess what, I'm not going to bother to fix it. I'm sick of hacking IE6 bugs. You should upgrade your browser anyway. Why are you still using the outdated browser?"
Why trash IE6 hacks?
I know this is difficult because about 37% (according to w3schools.com) of internet users are still using IE6. But, together we can make a different. Stop using IE hacks on your sites and let them see the ugly side of IE6. Eventually, they will find a better browser (ie. Firefox) or at least upgrade to newer version of IE.
Update:
Agree with the comments below, the statistic from W3schools does not reflect the entire internet. According to TheCounter.com, the global browser stats of IE6 users is 52% in July 2007.
Support me
If you agree with me, please support Web Designer Wall by making a vote and spreading out the word. Let's trash all IE hacks and code happily ever after...
Loading ...Conclusion
85% voted yes
15% voted no
Here are what people have said:
- "My boss will fire me if my sites don't work in IE6" because 52% of internet users are still using IE6.
- Display a message (in yellow bar), "You are using an outdated browser, please upgrade your browser" to IE6 users.
- If it is a personal project, you can ignore all the IE6 users. But for professional or commercial projects, you can't live without them.
- Avoid using any features (ie. PNG, CSS selectors) that are not supported by IE6.
Trash it, trash it! Make them upgrade or switch!
althought I would love to trash all the IE6 hack, I don’t know if my boss is gonna let me :(
PS: Nice artwork for this article! Can you give me a wallpaper of that?
@Calvin Chan: March straight up to his table and go to this page and show him this post!
Chances are, many IE6 users who haven’t yet upgraded won’t be ‘web savvy’ enough to notice slight errors in the rendering of your website, and they will just get a slightly less polished experience. Even if they do notice that, they won’t know why, except that maybe the web designer had a lack of attention to detail. People are only really likely to notice there’s something wrong if the layout is so broken it becomes unusable. And if that’s the case, you should also put a notice at the top (using CSS to hide it from other browsers) advising that they upgrade their browser. Maybe even use CSS to style the notice like IE’s default yellow warning bar.
This may be something you can do on a personal site, but I’m not sure clients in the ‘real world’ of web design would appreciate it on their sites.
we just need to wait. In two years ie6 will be marginal browser
It’s about time we force a change. If websites look like crap to them then they’ll be forced to switch! Maybe we should all add a little CSS to our pages.
* {display:none;}
lol or am I just being evil.
I’d love to trash IE hacks, I really would, but neither my employer nor their many government clients who are forced to use IE6 would be very happy about that. IE6 is a necessary evil for the time being – it will die out soon enough, until then I just keep my IE6 hacks in their own stylesheet to be deleted at a later date, and triple all my estimates.
I agree also, but being quite new to all this, I embraced IE6 and 7 and produced a complete stylesheet for both and a separate one for firefox etc.
http://www.fatboyjim.com
Got the idea from Malarkey http:/www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk
Sorry;
http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk
Trash them hacks. An upgrade to IE7 is more than worth it.
couldnt agree more!
ie 6 doesnt deserve our attention!
trash IE6 hacks, trash IE6 and trash IE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I completely agree. At least for private web sites. I do not spend time on fixing Internet Explorer 6 bugs for nearly a year now. Instead, visitors using IE6 see a information bar: CSS information bar for Internet Explorer
I don’t have time to fix all these IE6 hacks. I voted to trash them. Anyway I use IE7 so hopefully no-one uses IE6 anymore…..!
As much as I hate it I’m afraid I’m with Paul Annett on this one – for the ‘average’ web user it won’t make a difference, we can’t persuade them to change browser because they probably don’t know what a browser even is. They’re more likely to think the sites crap than theres anything wrong with their computer (and their computer is what they would blame – to them it is the browser).
It’s also not just the fault of home users, many corporate users, especially in the public sector, don’t have a choice – its up to the IT department to make the move (and not matter what way you punt it thats a daunting task for thousands of machines!). The majority of our customers are either public sector or big organisations and as a result 90% of our users are on IE6 and theres nothing we can do about it! If we turned round and said “get a better browser” we’d loose business, plain and simple.
On a side note, I’d wish people would stop using the w3schools browser stats as a true representation of usage – the majority of visitors there will be people like us (developers/designers) who probably use Firefox. Check out TheCounter (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/) for what I think is more reliable stats.
Although everyone would LOVE to ditch the hacks (me included) you just can’t. You’ve got to adapt to the market unfortunately, so until IE6 is gone, us designers have to build to suit.
I totally agree! If the users don’t even bother to upgrade, they should see the ugly side of IE and my guess is that they don’t even care that it looks ugly.
Yeah! now I just need to convince my boss and our clients that 30% of the users ( won’t see the website right ), and that is the whole problem… not us
Good – it’s great to see an article about this. I’ve used transparent png’s in a few recent projects and I get emails about “why there’s a gray box” on a certain diagonal element – and I tell them it’s because their browser is too old and to get Firefox. I don’t do too many things that require a hack, but if it would need one (like the png issue) I ignore it. Why should I do more work for people who won’t even appreciate it?