I hate Internet Explorer 6

Pretty much every designer says this, and with good reason. IE6 is around 8 years old now, and severely out of date. Designing around its bugs is a royal pain in the ass, and it’s necessary to do so because IE6 still has such a large userbase; 33%, by this source, as of March of this year. Additionally, the type of site you run will dictate the type of people who visit your site, and thus, the type of browser those people run when they visit your site. A web development site will probably see much less than the above-mentioned 33% IE6 traffic, while a site aimed at a non-tech-savvy audience might see even more than the above 33%. In other words, making your site work in IE6 is definitely a necessity.

I mention this because one solution that feels very satisfying is just giving up on IE6, and I admit to being tempted to do this. If every designer started doing this, the thought is that IE6 users would be persuaded to upgrade because of all the websites that would not render correctly in their browser. This will not work, however, because it ignores one of the largest groups of users still stuck with IE6; employees forced to use the outdated browser due to company policy. At any rate, any user still using IE6 without being forced to probably doesn’t know any better, and these users are the hardest to convince to change, and the most likely to blame the website rather than their browser for rendering incorrectly. And, again, the thought of sacrificing ~33% of web traffic to my website (well, much less than 33% in my case, but still) just to make a point doesn’t seem like a very good idea once I really think about it. As I said above, designing for IE6 is a necessity.

So, what do we do about it? Nothing, near as I can tell. We just have to keep slogging through and designing for IE6, hoping the usage numbers keep getting smaller. I, for one, am getting lazier in my IE6 hacks, sometimes leaving off things or stopping when it mostly works rather than working until it looks identical (IE6 users are rare on my websites, according to server logs). It sucks, but it’s just part of the job.