Now if your like the rest of the web design and development community and your protesting to stop IE6 from living past 2013 stand up and congratulate yourself, IE6 is what i call the holly demon for web developers because of it’s frustrating and it’s incredibly in-secure core. A lot of web developers still have to support IE6 not for their own project but for digital agencies and/or companies they may work for, because of this at times our work load can be doubled because of annoying double margin or z-index bugs for example.

In the end we all accomplish getting the demon to play nice and work but in the time we spent working on fixes and :hover emulation using JavaScript we could have been creating really slick functionality that works fine in IE7+ and all modern web browsers, but no!

IE6 just keeps holding back corporate companies such as telecommunications, utilities and even the government sector, the main reason behind this is a lot of people who use IE6 are either:

• Blind or
• Technologically impaired

Now i have nothing against people who may not have any vision or doesn’t know much about computers in general but unless they are helped to understand the benefits of enjoying much richer content and safer browsing they will continue to use the stone age of browsers, in my opinion your are 99.99% more likely to fall pray to scams in IE6 then what you are in IE7 for example just because the security and updates and there where as IE6 hasn’t had a proper updated released in years.

I recently purchased Parallels and installed Windows XP using a valid XP Home CD i still have and the first update that appeared in my list was “Internet Explorer 8 for Windows XP”, now if that doesn’t say Microsoft are trying to get rid of IE6 then you must be living in another world. Now i understand companies with hundreds or even thousands of employees have their problems when it comes to updating machine after machine but why not simply give users access to update Windows at will.

Most employee servers use Citrx which is one of the most comprehensive server management tools around for large companies, surely there would be a button an administrator can click and say…

Hey! Give these users access to Windows updates so we can stop supporting IE6 and start living in the modern browser age.

More then likely that button doesn’t exist but in the long run it’s not going to kill the I.T department to hire a few more souls to help out with updating IE after working hours because you can simply click a few buttons and move onto the next machine.

Before i ramble on any longer i think i need to point out my reasons why i dislike and name call IE6 with a passion:

• Double margin bug
• No support for native element :hover states other then anchor tags
• z-index bugs especially when borders are included in the mix
• <select> DOM stack ordering, hate having to use iframe hacks
• No support for PNG’s, PNG fixes such as DD belatedPNG can cause issues for :hover states

I am sure there are more i have but I am too tired to think of them.

Thanks for reading.