Internet Explorer and I are not friends. But first, a little history.
Being an Apple kid, I did most my browsing on Netscape Navigator (which is a direct ancestor to our beloved FireFox). Once I started designing web pages, I found myself at odds with the dominant browser:Internet Explorer. Fast forwards to 2001. I had been using (relatively) new web technologies like CSS and transparent PNGs. When IE 6 came out that year, the improvements over IE 5 were massive, but still lacking a lot of features I wanted. I eventually moved over to the Mozilla Internet Suite, and eventually Safari (Apple's Web Browser) when it came out in 2003. Mozilla bases browsers (Netscape, Firefox, Camino,) Safari, Chrome, and Opera have a better history of implementing their browsers according to web standards. This means that developing for one browser, very often achieves very similar results on the others. Internet Explorer's support for web standards has been....lacking.
Now to be fair, Internet Explorer has come a long way in the past few years in implementing standards and having better features. There have even a handful of times where IE has rendered a page perfectly that firefox or Safari have choked on.
Being a web developer, I believe in designing web pages that look the same on multiple browsers. I believe it is my job to make the experience of a website as uniform as possible. People shouldn't have to suffer through poor experiences because I'm lazy or obstinate.
That being said, Internet Explorer 6 makes my life very hard. Being an 8 year old browser, it simply cannot implement new web features. This stifles creativity and takes time out of web developers day when they have to create a hack that makes the page work in IE6 and all of today's modern browsers. A few of my biggest gripes with IE 6 are:
- No transparency support for PNGs
- Poor CSS support
- No tabs
Not to mention that big payers in the web world (Youtube included) are dropping Internet Explorer support. IE 6 still has about %16 percent of the market.
That's why I'm supporting the IE No More Campaign This site gives web developers a nice little piece of code to encourage IE 6 users to upgrade. The code normally only shows up if you're using IE6, but I've put an example below so you can see what it looks like. It's unobtrusive and can be dismissed easily.
I'm definitely a Firefox/Safari fanboy, but the alternatives (Opera, Chrome, and IE8) are all much better than IE6. So please, if you're an IE6 user, think about upgrading. I promise that your web experience will be MUCH better . And even if you're using old versions of your current browser, give upgrading a thought. If more people use modern browsers, web designers like myself can make some pretty awesome stuff without fear of leaving people in the dust,