IE6

IE6. Kind of a dirty word for web designers. Cause of a lot of headaches. I bring it up right now, after reading a blog entry Trash All IE6 Hacks. Sounds really nice, right? Let’s just forget IE6 all together. We’ll make everyone upgrade! They’ll have to!

Yea, of course it sounds nice, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. For some sites, trashing IE6 hacks is great! This blog for example. I’ve decided to stop worrying about out of date, non standard supporting web browsers. I’ve checked my stats, and most of my visitors are using Firefox and Safari. Plus it’s a personal site. I don’t have to please everyone.

There’s more than just personal sites though. I have the luxury of a high percentage of Firefox users here. Gleamd however, steps outside the small world of the personal blog. While I can decide to exclude out of date browsers here, I’m not going to do that with Gleamd. As we attempt to reach a much broader, more mainstream audience in the long run, supporting browsers of all shapes and sizes becomes very important. The luxury of picking and choosing no longer applies. While it sounds great as a designer to say “forget them, they don’t know any better, and we’re not going to support them,” you can’t always expect everyone to keep their software up to date, or even know that they’re making a decision about their web browser.

I guess my point is this: know your audience. If you think you can benefit from not supporting IE6, go for it, you’ll be saving yourself a lot of time. But blanket statements are never going to apply here. Learning to support multiple platforms, and making it look good everywhere, is part of the art of web design.