You’re a mad, beautiful genius. I’d use that in a heartbeat.

Now if only I could get the bosses and the clients to sign off on that.

I like this idea. A lot.

“Agreed. Great concept. Thinking of how I can sell clients on this.”

I’d bet showing some of my current current clients how few of their users are using IE6, and then explaining how much time would be saved by using this instead of some stupid work-around would get them interested. I know my life would be much easier!

I think clients should be billed surplus for the luxury of supporting such an old browser, but not everyone thinks this way.

Yes, that makes sense—for some content.  But what if your content is not text?  What if you’re an artist and want to show off your work in a way that grabs the attention of the viewer—even if he’s one of the unlucky folks on IE6?  What about film directors, photographers, architects, landscape contractors, and well…  everyone except writers, editors, bloggers, and typewriter salesmen?

Not all content comes in well laid out, nicely kerned, Helvetica (or Arial!).  A lot of the world is visual.  Visual things make lightboxes, interesting layout, overlapping transparent elements really really desirable.  Yeah, you can live without them, and some clients can be convinced to go for that.  But more likely they’ll just move on to the next designer that’s willing to do the painful work of IE6 bug hunting.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m going to do the IE 6 parity thing until I can convince my clients they don’t need it, or they stop asking for it.  Until then it’s what the customers want, because its what their viewers want, so it’s what I deliver.

Good idea, but the corporate world already hates it.

There is no reason fighting nature (or users). We create the websites for them. If they see a reason for using IE6, we need to design for them. Otherwise we are excluding users. And guess what, it is much better for 100 people to see a simple design, then 75 a beautiful one. After all, no customer will decide not to buy a product, because she did not like the corners of the header.

I’m in the #1 camp. For personal sites this is a neat solution but most of my clients wouldn’t find this acceptable. I take Yahoo’s Graded Browser Support as a yardstick, and for professional sites I consider it is necessary to support IE6… for now.

p.s. If you could arrange for IE6 to be surgically removed from the Earth at your earliest convenience that would be great.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and code, Andy :)

I’m with #1 myself still, for now anyway… trying to code with IE6 in mind to avoid the main downfalls - but working towards our lovely modern browsers in terms of design details.
Too many people in different locations - and not out of choice - are still stuck with IE6 and I feel I need to keep the main visual appearance of the design, rather than stripping it down too drastically; still reluctant to punish people for their old setup.

PS: all for George’s notion of a elimination of the horrid headache asap :)

I remember a time when these feilds were all IE6!
You young ‘uns don’t know how lucky you got it!!

Probably the best IE6 fix I have ever read about. Nice, elegant and simple to implement. Also it encourages developers to write their HTML with semantics in mind, because having 3 h1-s at 3em in a footer wouldn’t look nifty at all.

We love you Andy <3

Don’t know what all the fuss is about. Seriously, none of the commenters had come up with this idea before?

This reply comes via a test of your proposal in IE6 itself so I can ‘see’ what you are proposing.

I am not sure I like this.

I find it that by implementing best practices, IE6 layout issues are rarely a problem even without hacks.

If any client I have every dealt with agreed to using this strategy to deal with ie6, I’d check myself into the local hospital as I would have probably lost my marbles.

It’s a nice idea, though.

Is it possible that you’ve forgotten to include the Conditional Comment for IE6 containing the “universal-ie6-css”-file on this particular page? As far as I would interpret the page’s source there aren’t any styles served to our favorite browser at all.

I still believe your approach to the IE6 problem should be based on a case by case basis! Not every clients requirements are the same, even as far as to what users will be using to view your work. All the solutions mentioned are valid, if you approach them this way.

Also happen to agree with Molly, design to standards and use good code first and foremost. This is what we do, so do it well, and then address any browser issues (if possible with more standards based code!).

Designing to best practices and standards should give a pretty high chance your design will degrade gracefully, so for me the issue often never arises in the first place, I can’t remember the last time I had to create an IE6 specific stylesheet in fact.

Awesome stuff. Last month I implemented something similar on our Refresh site based on what Dan Cederholm had written about IE6 stylesheet targeting. This, however, is a very nice alternative to no stylesheet at all for those stuck in the browser graveyard, love it!

I also implemented a small message using PHP to tell IE users why they were seeing what they might not have expected. You can see the implementation and php used at Refresh Louisville.

@Andy, do you think there is a benefit to explaining to users who receive this great solution why it’s in place? I’m sure a potential visitor may expect that something is broken for them. I could see that being a road block to clients who may be weary of this solution. Although, you’ve given me some additional language to help educate them in your post.

My gut reaction was that I didn’t like doing this to a user. But, after thinking about it for a little while, it’s actually not that bad… the page stays pretty clean.

That being said, I’m still not sold on it; it goes against the “One Web for Everyone” philosophy, and unfortunately, there’s still a ton of people who can’t upgrade past ie6 for various reasons. It’s not fair to intentionally damage their experience on the web.

I imagine this would be a damn-near impossible sale for a commerce web site or anyone with a business. Many of the solutions we (the community) come up with (most anti-ie6 stuff) would be best served for personal blogs but really never apply to real-world web site.

I can see a very valid argument using this for very old browsers like Netscape or IE5.5, but ie6 is still way too popular to toss it aside.

If we’re supposed to be a user-centered web, how come we don’t listen to the users who say they want to use ie6? We can guide our users, but we shouldn’t force them into something or punish them for doing something we think is “stupid”.

That’s my2cents. Honestly, it’s not a bad solution, and it was clearly well thought out; I just wouldn’t apply it to a client site.

Andy, you’re certainly advocating the right approach. Certainly one I would be willing to adopt when next having the choice. Unfortunately I am currently developing an Intranet application for an organisation where IE6 is the standard. They want a very particular design and also for it to look “just the same” when they eventually get around to upgrading browser (as yet unspecified product & time)

Nice idea.  For my blog.

When I’m selling products for clients, I want the best experience for the user.  They’re more likely to buy the product.

I’m trying to think of the use-case for a profit-making site who does not want to design for IE6.  Give me an example?

Small afternotes:
-  thankyou for answering your comments
-  your site design sometimes fails in Chrome.  I get a looong page, with the text drafting in the middle.

awesome discussion, definately food for thought, although a lot of the clients i build websites for are council funded schemes so upgrading to a better browser isnt an option.

i think ie6 will be around for a while and neglecting it just isnt an option.

Perfect… I’m going to add a link to this article on my recent blog post http://www.blog.redcentaur.com/is-ie6-dead/ which tries to answer some of the arguments about whether or not designers should even consider IE6 any more. I think this puts another reason why it’s not necessary to think like that!

Actually I can make IE6 behave ... 99%
which is fair enough

@Kilian Valkhof - I mentioned sencss on snook.ca’s blog entry, which responds to this fabw article. Your work is great.

@Evan Byrne, I agree with Andy on the IE6Update, it is a good idea to tell a user their browser is out of date, but to mimic the IE information bar is a little sneaky.  You are misleading a user.

I much prefer either a message in the site informing the user in plain text, or I often promote pushuptheweb.com, a much nicer way to fulfil the same end result as IE6Update.

Of course it is only a matter of opinion!

And I think the case by case aspect applies to the majority of the comments, and lets face it, being able to successfully implement all the methods is only going to make you a more rounded coder, not a worse one!

Premature. But I’m bookmarking it.

@Matt Bee, while using pushuptheweb.com may be less “sneaky” it will probably have a negative affect on the user experience because the user will more likely think it is a scam because it doesn’t look genuine.

Anyhow, you should just make your client sites work in IE6. It’s not that much harder if you are coding to standards. I don’t care if some of my own websites that are geared towards developers work in IE6 or not, but a client is going to want their site to work in all browsers.

@Pingu Hey, I’m not the only one using Chrome! Make sure you report to Google that the page doesn’t render properly too.  If enough of us complain Andy won’t have to do anything ;)

@Pingu, Stephanie: I also use Chrome for browsing (FF for development), but I have not had any issues with this site. I’m on 2.0.172.27, are you guys still on a 1.x version?

I am currently developing a site which is aimed (for the moment) at Latin and South America. After a bit of research we found that IE6 is by far and away the dominant browser in this geographical area. The reason for this is many people have pirated copies of windows that wont allow them to upgrade. This puts pay to the “people who dont upgrade are dumb and deserve to be punished/educated” idea.

I can just image the look on my bosses face when I tell him we are going to throw away all the complex layout for our main audience in order to encourage them to upgrade their browser. I think I would be getting a p45 pretty quickly.

I wrote a blog post addressing this technique and others:

http://devthought.com/blog/client-side/2009/05/an-ie6-post/

Let me know what you think

Re IE6 Update, yes, it’s phishing. Even so many may discuss its usage in the circumstances. I myself tend to agree with Matt Bee on it and would suggest using Pushup instead, like Matt suggested as well.

While we may discuss the ethics of Bait-and-switch approaches to force Internet Explorer update isn’t it something what the whole media is doing online as well as offline? The banners in a form of dialogue windows tricking you to click Cancel, Accept or Close window. Indeed unfortunate.

The main issue with initiatives like IE6Update is that they primarily talk to the developer, while the focus should be put on the end user. Website visitors are often now aware that alternatives exist, since most of them are convinced that the only option is to use the software pre-installed on their computer.

That’s why it’s all about education, but in a way the end user can understand, which can be achieved by avoiding complicated technical terms and by providing the explanation in the visitor’s own language.

That’s why the “Bye-Bye internet explorer 6” initiative tries to achieve (check for http://www.byebyeinternetexplorer.org).

I utterly agree with Francis above and add that ANY WEBSITE SHOULD BE STANDARDS COMPLIANT not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because many disabled people rely on W3C standards that are implemented in screen readers etc. IMHO, it’s more important to include those people vs people who don’t upgrade.

And to Ben above: the game has changed. The percentage of IE6 is shrinking rapidly even for the sales/consumer websites. I have around 30 websites on Analytics and IE shows a percentage of around 60% altogether roughly a quarter of which is IE6. That estimates the overall of IE6 being somewhere around 15%. That’s also the kind of number you can get from various stats, e.g. W3Schools Browser Statistics.

I think this is an awful idea, it’s lazy and militant for no good reason. When I began developing back in 2001 I had soon had the death of Netscape 4 to content with. There was still a sufficient number of users with Netscape so I felt it was my duty as a developer to provide them with a site which was close in design as originally intended.
Use IE conditional statements for IE6 stylesheets people and stop being so lazy. Fixes for IE6 literally take me minutes as opposed to hours or even days.

New suggestion for IE6 stylesheet:

body {
  display: none !important;
}

Going too far?

@Darren Taylor: Andy’s obviously gone to a fair amount of work to develop this method, document it, and discuss it, so I don’t think it’s very fair describing him as ‘lazy’, whether you agree with the concept or not. I think it’s up to the individual designer (and their client, of course) whether they want a design that will adapt to various browser conditions, look identical in every browser, or have multiple designs for various audiences. This is not about dropping support for IE6, just giving it a valid, maintainable design that it can cope with flawlessly.

I suppose it comes down to people driving art and science, or art and science driving people.

Guys I apologise if I sounded offensive, I guess I was on one of my rants! My point was though that if you develop a site, its standards compliant, uses valid markup and css and looks great in Firefox, just HOW BAD does it look in IE6? I find frequently the answer is, not much. I’d actually draw comparisions here with developing a website to web standards. For example I could knock together some sites using non-semantic markup in day. The same sites might take me 3/4 days to do if I ensure my templates are AA compliant and also cross browser friendly, but this is the standard I set anyway. Should I compromise my principles because a customer wants the site quicker or cheaper? Absolutely not.
Same applies with this concept. Additionally you are knowingly putting out a site which will cause some users problems. We apply designs to websites for a reason. Not just to make them look good but also to enforce branding, to improve readability, to improve usability and a whole other host of reasons. I work in the NICS with over 34,000 employees. The vast majority use IE6 because for reasons beyond my control, IE7 hasn’t been rolled out. Is it fair that these people receive a “dumbed down” site? Is content alone enough? I personally don’t believe it is and strongly advocate that developers take pride in their work and spend the extra time to ensure cross browser compatibility where browsers have sufficient market share. Refer to your favourite web analytics tool to see what those browsers are!

@Darren Taylor:

... if you develop a site, its standards compliant, uses valid markup and css and looks great in Firefox, just HOW BAD does it look in IE6?

Seriously? Obviously, it all depends on what CSS properties and techniques you use, but floats, a lot of spacing-related properties, and many other layout techniques fail horribly in IE6. They’re bad enough in IE7 which still doesn’t even understand text-align properly. These are the very properties that will produce a result that is far less usable than Andy’s ‘dumbed down’ version.

I think all of us, however, including Andy, would agree that there are some cases where this technique is unacceptable. For now.

Bobby jack: “if ie6update isn’t trying to deceive people, why bother with the chrome-copy? If it is, the developers should at least admit that. Even though we all know that it is ;)

The issue of what it’s tricking people into doing isn’t being debated, but how it does it.”

Then WHY are we debating this? I remember someone telling me that IE6Update was phishing, which is pretending to be a trusted source in order to gain access to confidential information or cause other harm to the victim. IE6Update hardly fits that description!

Why do website developers have to be so overzealous? We all are (should be) trying to achieve the same thing, build great websites for our clients.

@Nick Toye - NICS is the Northern Ireland Civil Service, IE6 is the standard browser and upgrade to IE7 didn’t take place largely due to the fact that our CMS front end tool didn’t support it. It does now so as for why we are still using IE6, sorry not my area! It does highlight though as commented above, the are surely other organisations, perhaps libraries, colleges, community groups etc using IE6. Should they be forced to upgrade to IE6? No, not if it’s the browser of their choice, perhaps that’s what they are comfortable with. Should they expect the same experience as a Firefox 3 user? Perhaps not but as I stated above, yes if your browser stats tell you they are still a significant part of your user base.

@Bobby Jack - I’m not trying to achieve pixel perfection here but floats, spacing issues etc are a hassle in IE6 but certainly not something that take me ages to fix. Additionally if the layout is slightly degraded then there is a point of compromise which I think this article has failed to address, instead opting to just encourage treating IE6 users as lower class citizens.

I think that many of you have missed the point of Andy suggestion.  If I’m not mistaken, he is not suggesting that we shouldn’t build standards compliant websites, or that we should use this in every situation (he has re-iterated this in many of his comments). His simply adding it as a scenario based option for sites that are driven by content, and not “bell and whistles”.

Content that is almost always written words and that means type.

Instead, you and I should provide simple but effectively designed HTML elements. This means just great typography for headings, paragraphs, quotations, lists, tables and forms and no styling of layout.

I like this idea as a solution for these situations.

Those that feel ie6 bashing is called for need to remember that not everyone is using ie6 because they want to.  I know two personal situations myself. 
We have two desktops computers in our house one is quite new and uses the latest browsers and gets to see sites in all their glory, and the other is older.  Very old and does not have the capability to run the latest and greatest.  Whenever I am forced to use our old computer I always just wish I could access a site.  I don’t care if it’s got millions of colors, or fancy JavaScript.  I just want to be able to access the content.  So this solution actually ends up being very feasible imho.  Sometimes it’s frustrating to have to tolerate even the best attempts at hacking a stylesheet to make it work in older browsers.

From the voice of experience on the users end I would prefer to see sites using Andy’s solution.  I hate when a site won’t let me view it at all on that computer just because the browser is old.

To those of you using Chrome, you can add me to the list ;) I also use chrome on the older computer because most of it’s issues are ram based, and Chrome doesn’t seem too cause those problems.

On a side note: Andy I’ve been a long time lurker and love reading your articles keep up the darn good reads :)

By doing this you’re merely keeping IE6 alive and kicking. When enough of us turn our backs on IE6 it will finally die the death it so richly deserves.

LOL @ Malarkey, this sounds like man who kinda wished he hadn’t started something! I’m gonna create a rare blog post on this as I feel my points are getting lost in the mix. I would like to reinforce the point though that I believe it’s wrong to expect users to upgrade. I also struggle to think of occasions when a site focused only on content is still as usable without a some structural styling, perhaps only small brochureware sites.

@Whisper, sorry about that.

Just need to get down of this horse that is far too high.

With the complete dearth of content from old school bloggers in the age of Twitter, I love how active Andy is being with his blog. My new favorite.

Hmmmm…great idea. Now, can I convince my client to serve his site like this?

Since we should be creating print stylesheets anyway, perhaps we should just use our print stylesheet for IE 6. Generally streamlined, cruft removed, and matches the spirit/typography of the site.

I must say I partially agree with this method. I think if your traffic is less then 10% from IE6 this method is perfect . But if you have 20-30% I prefer ” the stable structure” method meaning the grid(columns) will not fall apart and user have similar experience like in other browsers.

Strangely this Monday I published one CSS Library who has totally different purpose but very similar CSS Structure like your project.
It’s called Better Web Readability Project - CSS Library and aims to improve the reading and readability on the Internet.

Fortunately the era of IE6 is finishing so we can spend more time on other things not IE6 testing.

I applaud a re-thinking like this, grounded in pragmatism and a dose of originality. This is much more than an academic question as IE6 will, like it or not, remain widely used for a while. Thanks for the thought-provoking solution to this ongoing problem Andy.

@ Andy - thanks for this topic, it’s renewed my love of blogging and social networking in general.
Don’t get me wrong I share the IE6 frustration and as I said in my own blog, perhaps my problem is that I work in Government and have a different viewpoint on things, I just think that we cannot collectively force people to stop using IE6. Interestingly I looked at W3C Browser stats and for April 2009 15.4% are STILl using IE6. Now a lot of people on W3C are developers but would they really surf with IE6 out of preference? So interesting stat and reflective of what I see in NI Government.

I don’t think you are talking tosh Matt but I think the point Andy is trying to make is why spend longer developing sites for IE6 and passing that cost onto the customer? My point is that I think any developer worth his salt should be ensuring the site works as intended on all browsers the site owners customers are likely to be using. Hence my comparision with web standards, you do it because its the right thing to do.

Absolutely right Matt, why not some of you go for it and publicly advertise themselves with “We do IE6 development too” or “We do it for older platforms as well”.

Even so, I very much doubt the idea of competitiveness against the guys who just say “We do it standards-compliant and cross-platform” as that’s very likely going to work on IE6 too.

Those of you tired of this all, I welcome you to join in on discussion about CSS 3.

I’d like to add my two cents here as a user of IE6.

I haven’t upgraded because all I have heard for years is how bad IE7 is.  Yes, I have Firefox and use it to check sites with.  I just don’t particularly like to use it as my main browser because I’m used to Outlook and don’t have the time or the inclination to re-learn something that I don’t have to. 

I have asked the opinion of the techs at Dell and at my ISP.  Both tell me NOT to upgrade.  It seems a bit strange to me that the only ones that encourage it are the ones that are designing sites that sometimes don’t render correctly in it.

That being said, I don’t notice if “corners are not rounded” or anything like that.  I guess if you never know it, you don’t miss it.  What I do have a problem with is when certain Wordpress blogs and websites are designed to completely fill a widescreen monitor.  Parts of the page just disappear completely.  Maybe it’s the width, maybe it’s the coding itself…I don’t know.  But it generally takes a designer about 5 minutes to fix it, and since about 25% of users are on IE6, it seems a bit silly to argue about it.

Personally I don’t care for a full-screen wide website anyway.  I think they look better with a background, and then everyone is taken care of.

Just my two cents.  I still have no desire to upgrade to IE7 or 8, either.

Jan

@Darren Taylor: regarding your CMS front end: first off, I imagine it’s not your job to visit collegehumor.com or go shopping at work. I find that upgrading to a better, faster, more secure browser will pay for the cost of fixing a bad CMS for most clients (reduction in IT costs due to fewer virus outbreaks, etc. resulting from IE6 exploits, higher productivity, better server performance), however for those where this is not the case or they simply cannot afford the development costs, it makes a lot of sense to use IE6 as the intranet browser and enforce use of a standards-compliant, secure browser for web browsing.

As for treating IE6 users as ‘second class citizens’ - it is not reasonable for an owner of a 1983 Toyota to demand the same driving experience as the owner of a Mercedes. Moreso if they’re offered a Mercedes for free and refuse it because they don’t want to get used to the new car smell and the digital instrument panel.

@Rob Cornelius: Software pirates are welcome to install free browsers (and to use free operating systems such as Ubuntu). I understand one has to meet client & customer expectations, but maybe providing a little publicity for a quality browser of your choice on the sites you design would be a good investment of your time, with a carrot in the form of some slightly improved user experience for users of that browser. In their case it may be an issue of ignorance rather than stupidity, and you may actually do them a favor by offering enlightenment.

“Clients won’t go along with it”: I have one regular client who is very insistent on complete IE6 support for the front-end of all sites. They also insist on table-based layouts which only use CSS for fonts & colors (they don’t think standards compliant sites are ‘ready for prime time’) - which is one reason that I do only backend development for them :P My other regular clients are willing to accept an alternative IE6 layout as long as it captures the essence of the design. I’d like to get to the point of using a barebones solution like Andy’s - along with a little ad in the footer showing what they’re missing out on, so they’re encouraged to upgrade.

@Justen-
Jan: you find it strange that the people who are most qualified to know what browser is most useful for browsing are the only people who recommend it? :)

I know I’m probably going to really get flamed on this one, but since I’m on a roll, I might as well dive in.

You say that “designers” are most qualified.  I’m afraid I have to dispute that.  I’m afraid I’m going to have to take the word of a Dell technician or someone who troubleshoots for my internet service before I am going to listen to a web developer.

On a small level, I design websites myself.  I learned how to WRITE html and use Notepad to build my sites.  Takes me a long time, yes.  But if you put one of my hand-done, NO-CSS websites up against one that is done with all the bells and whistles, and all links and things are the same…Google is going to lap mine up with a cat with a bowl of milk.

Designers love CSS because it’s faster.  I love tables and straight HTML because it ranks quicker and better. Yes, a site designed with CSS will rank, too.  But the less of it that’s used, the better off it will be for SEO.  And I know ya’ll will deny that to your dying day.

It’s not only IE6 that chokes on the quick fix.  Mobile phones don’t take it…email blasts don’t work with it.  Newsletters have to be done twice to be sent out and then to be put on the website.  Just because you can create a site faster doesn’t mean it’s better.  Most of the designers that use CSS are not that good at it, and those are the ones that pop out sites with problems.

But it’s all good.  It keeps the web from looking the same across all the websites.  There will always be designers who will go the extra mile to do work for me when I need it, and there will always be customers that will be happy with my plainer ones as long as they are tops in Google.

And eventually I will upgrade to IE8 or better, I’m sure.  Until then, I’ll continue to run across sites that I can’t use, and complain to the owners when I do.  Lord knows I buy enough online as it is.  It’s better for my wallet to have a few sites I can’t shop on.

I knew you’d say that.  It’s ok.  We all have our opinions about these things.  For the record, I wasn’t talking about the first line techs at Dell.  I asked one of top-level guys last time.  I agree that the ones you usually talk to sometimes know less than I do. I’ve been doing SEO for 6 years now.  Maybe somewhere there is a CSS based site that would outrank an old-time hand-done one.  I haven’t seen it yet, though.  But I’m not going to argue about it.  I just voiced my own opinion. I could throw some more fuel on the fire and say that with a few tweaks, Blogger Blogs rank better and faster than WordPress blogs.  But I won’t open that can of worms…:-)

Jan, regarding Dell technicians, they’re not really ‘technicians’, they’re monkeys trained to follow procedures written on digital flash cards. If you’d like the advice of a technician, I was a technician (a real one, with real skills) for several years. I’ll tell you right now: IE7 is faster, safer, and more capable than IE6. I did recommend not upgrading to people in the first 6 months or so for the following reasons:

1. They were a corporate customer with an intranet built to run in IE6 - in which case I recommended testing the system before deploying IE7, and using a more secure and capable browser (such as Firefox) for web browsing.

2. They were an AOL user, because AOL software was incompatible with IE7 and AOL would actually cause computers to slow down and freeze up with IE7 installed. I recommended removing AOL software, since it’s not necessary to using AOL services.

3. They ran Windows 95/98/2000 - IE7 is not compatible with those systems. I’d recommend Firefox (or a new pc :P).

That said I feel I am much more qualified now to discuss browser technology, since my current job is to know how each browser works and what it’s capable of. Specifics of browser technology is only tangentially related to the technician’s sphere of knowledge, which is the diagnosis and repair of problems impeding the operation of the computer.

As far as SEO, I suggest you research your claims a little more thoroughly, for your clients sake if not for your own.

Usage like IE7 the library http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/ would be handy too