Will their ever be a point in life where you can build your website and make it look great in all browsers and just completely forget about making it look right in IE 6 and below?

I think people have stopped caring about <= IE 5.5 and I hope that happens with IE 6 soon because they already have IE 7 and IE 8 is in BETA stages.

Is it still relevant to build for IE 6 anymore, or should it be left alone and only focused to look right in IE 7?

Would it be reasonable to use some Javascript to detect the browser being used, and if it's <= IE 6, then a message is clearly displayed to upgrade or switch browsers to get a better experience.

Does anyone else have any views or opinions on this subject?

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Not quite a n00b...

Browser Statistics indicates that there is still a substantial portion of people using 6. So yes, still code for it.

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Just forgo worrying about Exploder all together, I say. Fight the power. *throws on a little marley*

According to some browser stats (many available, I took mine from Browser Statistics) there's still at least 25% of the users out there running IE6 or lower. That constitutes a large number of potential users that you may not want to disregard just yet. The numbers are declining however, and if anybody wants to do their part;
Firefox web browser | Faster, more secure, & customizable
-m

VI beat me by a few seconds.

It's not too hard to support IE6 honestly, the biggest annoyance I've run into and absolutely despise is it's lack of support for PNG alpha transparency. Other than that I've done, and seen, a lot of rather spiffy designs that degrade gracefully if you're using valid xhtml and css. Or at least mostly valid.
-m

Apple recently dropped support for IE6 users for MobileMe (I think).
As long as you can get your pages to degrade gracefully and allow the user to be aware of why it looks bad or has less/little normal functionality you shouldn't loose too many people.
Sadly though, I still ask people what their favorite browser is, and they respond, "Internet Explorer?" And I ask what version they use, "I don't know."

To be fair, a lot of general use people know their computers run Windows, but if you ask them what Operating System is installed, they'll hem and haw. Quite a few don't even know the difference between RAM and HD space. This isn't to say they're dumb, they just use their computer the way it's been intended to be used by the common user; as an appliance, like a microwave, that does what they need when they need it, and nothing more.

It's the major reason why we need to have such a length of backwards compatibility. If you weren't sure what your RAM was, would you have a good idea of when to upgrade or why? Probably not.

Again, they're not dumb, they're just put on this earth to make our lives a living hell. They fulfill the balance.
-m

In Januari, Microsoft said to make IE7 a explicit update (is that the correct use of words??? o_O). So when that happens the usage of 6 will drop significantly. But I'm an ass, when some little things don't work that good in IE6 i sometimes just parse an error saying the user should download a real brower... (ok, that's a lie)

I hope we can stop supporting IE6 in two years or so.

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Nunchaku! Who doesn't like martial arts? =)

If you don't mind losing visitors, you're free to stop support for whole IE :).

I know alot of these corporations are running 6 and less. From my experience within the corporations... the ones who aren't on cutting edge tend to be 5-6 years behind the curve.

For instance, a hospital that I recently just did some work for just at the end of last summer just recently upgraded from windows 2002 to windows XP. Windows XP was still running 6.

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There are No Stupid Questions. But there a LOT of Inquisitive Idiots.

Windows XP is a much better upgrade than Vista.

I actually like Vista :) I dont see what everyones problem is with it. My games and all programs run fine on it. Though I do have a machine that has a few ponies behind it.

Above all else, Vista is shiny... which is a win win for me :) :grin:

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There are No Stupid Questions. But there a LOT of Inquisitive Idiots.

you don't really need any ponies to run vista - I have a spare set up in my house 64mb of onboard VRAM, a gig of DDR2 800 ram, and a 3ghz hyperthreaded processor and vista runs like a beauty (albeit...XP runs even better)

True but an even greater upgrade is linux (im talking about general running, not program compatibility)
mainly because it doesn't sit there and eat up an inordinate amount of memory just sitting idle

Anyway back to the topic, yes we must unfortunately as sadly a high amount of users are still using it, this causes the problem of having to have CSS hacks all over the place but also it means that new technologies will take even longer to become main stream.
Personally we should, but from a business perspective you really cant afford the drop in visitors to your site.

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mysql> SELECT * FROM `users` WHERE `users`.`clue` > 0;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

Hell, I wouldn't even code for IE7 if I had the opportunity. This thread reminded me that I haven't checked my administration package under IE lately, and bringing it up (running more than valid CSS) everything looks nearly like it's supposed to except that there's some random MAJOR variations in margin settings that have caused my forms to not line up properly.

Why... oh why... and yes I fully agree on the Linux. I just upgraded to 4 gigs of ram from 2 in my dual core so that I could accomodate the fact that Vista itself (before any additional applications) was mowing down on over a gig of ram. And that's after I turned off over 40% of the useless services that it installs with, disabled a variety of useless features (not the least of which being the UAC), and turned off a bunch of other crap.
-m

Here's an example. In Firefox, we get the intended result, the way it should be according to
CSS box model and valid markup:



and yet, in exploder,



...the rules for select boxes and text inputs are EXACTLY the same. Yet the margins are completely different. I $##@$#@%$#% hate IE.
-m

Well okay, IE6 sucks with CSS, but in the end it is quite easy to make hacks for IE, it just takes a little bit of work time. Nothing we can do about it :)

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Nunchaku! Who doesn't like martial arts? =)

I have stopped coding for IE6. I make sure that the user can get around the site, so my dropdown menu's or other major features work, but if something looks wrong I don't even bother to fix it. Unless the client says something or I know that the client is still running IE6.

Same goes for any version of IE on a mac. I really couldn't care less for them. Even if the page comes up blank only for them thats fine with me.

And those stats from w3schools, arent they just for w3schools? They are not very accurate. FF does not have almost 40% yet. Check out W3Counter - Global Web Stats those seem to be more accurate

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Personally I am not to sure what you guys are having so many issues with. Most of my stuff degrades nicely across the browsers. Then again, I code XHTML strict with 0 errors / warnings. Now If I go back to 5... then some really funky stuff starts happening!

For instance though, you wont find a single table in my pages, save tabular data. Even the forms are laid out with nothing more then p's, labels, and span's.

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There are No Stupid Questions. But there a LOT of Inquisitive Idiots.

Tables have nothing to do with ie6. Tables actually should show better. Its overkill not to use them.

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While that is what you believe, I use tables for what they are intended for -- tabular data. Not display / presentation.

IMO things are much more easily organized without tables anyways.

But, with that said, tables do work and there is nothing wrong with tables. Its simply a preference.

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There are No Stupid Questions. But there a LOT of Inquisitive Idiots.