This is a big subject for me as it’s very annoying, IE6 is a pain in the arse, and it always has been, my previous posts will tell you how much I hate the browser.

Recently I have been working on CSS/JS based graphs. The designs for these graphs are amazing, but I shuddered at the thought of porting transparent PNG’s over to IE6 to make this work, and the unforeseeable problems faced by using css/js “hacks” to add certain features to a browser that never fully supported it.

My solution is this… use what’s there, don’t even think of enhancing it. By adding support for transparent PNG’s for a browser that doesn’t fully support it seems silly to me, and goes against my rule of not modifying the browsers default behavior. Why should we keep entertaining IE6 and nudging along a dying horse, whilst we shouldn’t take a shotgun and shoot the fucker point blank in the face, there’s no point in attempting to enhance it and add support by using IE7 support JS to make IE6 behave like IE7.

If you’re more of a visual person, here are a few graphs to show you what I mean…

bad

This is a graph to show the headache caused when trying to backward port features from modern day browsers to IE6

This is a graph to show what should actually happen, IE6 development should stop where the features are no longer supported, i.e. transparent PNG's, then you can enhance the experience for people who don't use "broken" browsers

This is a graph to show what should actually happen, IE6 development should stop where the features are no longer supported, i.e. transparent PNG's, then you can enhance the experience for people who don't use "broken" browsers

We should seriously take a look at this and consider what we’re doing here, by supporting dying browsers we’re encouraging people and companies not to upgrade their browsers, we’re supposed to be driving technology not dragging it by it’s heels.

Let me put it another way… if Microsoft didn’t screw up IE so much we would be doing things like this now! Without Flash!