Are you still checking your site in IE 6 and do IE hacks?
We stopped officially supporting IE6 late last year, and actively encourage our customers to upgrade. We’ve even managed to get corporates to uprade their platform (it took some doing!).
We’ve always avoided CSS hacks as typically can work around them with alternative approaches which are less likely to cause issues with future browsers.
No. I stopped supporting IE6 two years ago at least. The only reason people failed to upgrade from IE6 (released in 2001) was because webmasters kept supporting it.
I’ve read different reasoning. Every web developer I’ve known completely loathed IE6. We’ve only supported it because people won’t/can’t get rid of it.
Because some businesses and government organizations built intranet applications using IE6, they couldn’t upgrade or they would break (meaning it would be expensive to rewrite their application to work in another browser). Also, company politics, and support and upgrade costs came into play.
Very few of the visitors to my sites using IE6 have been from governments or businesses.
Besides, if anyone had a motivation to upgrade away from IE6 because of security issues, it would be those who harbor sensitive data such as businesses or governments.
In my experience, medium sized (and some large) businesses tend to be very late adopters, as well as local government (state tends to vary, though).
But–that also depends on the strength & skills of the IT department (if there is one), the willingness to put forth money to invest in the cost of upgrades (staff time, software, equipment, and support costs), and the willingness of those in charge to let those upgrades happen. Some people in charge cling fiercely to the “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” motto in order to either avoid change or avoid costs. After all, IT is a money pit.
I’ve seen businesses and government running without simple things like antivirus software. The chances are that if they don’t want to invest in that, browsers are somewhat low on their priority list.
How do you know? If your site is aimed at people rather than businesses, they may well be using work computers during their lunch break (or during office time!).
Besides, if anyone had a motivation to upgrade away from IE6 because of security issues, it would be those who harbor sensitive data such as businesses or governments.
You’d think, wouldn’t you. The local government organisation I work for is in the early stages of migrating from IE6/Office2000 to IE8/Office2007, but there are still the majority of employees on the old setup.
Because Statcounter does a lookup that tells me which network they are coming from and also identifies their browser.
Just goes to show the incompetence of all forms of government.
At one time IT was seen as a competitive advantage. Some companies do see IT as a “money pit”. However, they should realize how dependent on computers modern business has become and that maintaining systems and software to modern standards and for basic security purposes is still mission critical. Getting hacked is bad public relations. Would you do business with a bank that was hacked because a vulnerability in a 10-year-old browser was exploited giving the hacker access to all of your personal information?
A company that will not upgrade a 10-year-old browser is not one that I would want to work for. They probably don’t pay very well. They are like a delivery company making rounds in an old Model-T.
Unfortunately, not everyone understands the ins and outs of technology. As such, the risk/reward ratio can be skewed because of ignorance in that area. “No way we’ll get hacked…that never happens! We paid a fortune in software/hardware 10 years ago and it should be just as good now as it was then.”
And yes, that was sadly a discussion I took part in a few years ago. 
Unless if I have to, I do not support IE6. It’s irritating having to take a nice layout and then put hacks in it.
I’ve seen businesses and government running without simple things like antivirus software. The chances are that if they don’t want to invest in that, browsers are somewhat low on their priority list.
No wonder they get hacked sometimes. What kind of protection do they use if they don’t have antivirus software?
Hopes and dreams?
I’ve also seen some disable the built-in windows firewall because it “interfered” with applications that were used by the organization.
Facebook, Youtube, and Digg dropped support for IE6 either partially or completely.
You can argue that many corporations use IE6. Well, people are not supposed to be surfing the web at work anyway.
Statcounter says that IE6 use accounts for 5% of browser market share. IE6 share is about 3% in the U.S., down from 6% a year ago.
If those numbers are accurate, IE6 will eventually be nothing more than a bad memory. The Windows Blog celebrates the fact that IE6 share is 5% or less based on data from [URL=“http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=12&qpcustom=3332&sample=35”]NetMarketShare. According to NetMarketShare, IE6 use is at 5% or less in most industrialized nations including the United States with 46% of all browsers in China using IE6.
So, do you want to support something that less and less people are using every day? Or do you want to kiss IE6 goodbye forever as I do?
By the way, is there a complete list of IE6 hacks? I can’t imagine having to start working on a design using 2001 standards.
Absolutely not true. There are hundreds of thousands, probably more, computers out there whose users have no choice but to use IE6, and it has nothing to do with web designers’ choices. I have to keep it on my computer at home because my work’s site is designed for IE – lots of proprietory MS crud – and won’t work on non-IE browsers.
What I try to do is design so my sites are current and compliant, and degrade gracefully in IE6. It can be done, especially if you approach your designs with this in mind from the outset.
That’s still more people than using mobile phone browsers or Opera for many sites, but do you make an effort to support those? If you’re going to play the numbers game then you have to be consistent about it.
So you have proprietary stuff that only work on IE6 but not on any higher versions?
Are these ActiveX objects or plugins? I’m curious.
Supporting Opera isn’t nearly the nightmare that supporting IE6 is. At least not the most current version. The CSS gradient I use did not work, but it degrades to a solid background color that looks OK as it does in IE.
I recently redesigned a site of mine and did the redesign solely with Firefox as my target. It just happened to work fine in IE7 and the latest versions of Opera, Chrome, and Safari without any additional work at all, even using PMOB’s sticky footer.
I didn’t have to put any thought into supporting IE7, Safari, Opera, or Chrome. Everything I did for Firefox worked in those browsers. And this is how web design should be and would be if not for IE6.
3% of my “hits” (which I translate to being requests for such things as pages, images, and files) on my most heavily visited site are from various Opera versions. The lowest Opera version is 7.11. 10.1% of my “hits” are from mobile devices.
Sometimes bots will use an user agent string of an old browser, I think. Don’t they? Maybe that’s why I’m getting hits from Netscape version 0.6 and 0.91. Do you support Netscape 0.6 by any chance?
Do you support Netscape 3? Safari 1.3.2? Do you support Internet Explorer 2? I got 1139 “hits” from IE2 this month. Surely you are not going to argue that we support IE2.
Is it even possible to have all those old browsers installed on a computer at the same time? You can’t do that with IE.
I’ll check out Browser Shots. I thought it was a pay service at one time. It looks like it is free now. Are there any other sites like Browser Shots? Especially free ones? Free or paid, I would love a list if you have one. 
I am eager to learn whatever you guys can share.
Not just activeX – back back BACK in the day M$ did something really weird and REALLY ahead of it’s time.
They made Trident available to programmers for use as a way to build your UI… basically working like GTK or QT… or more recently XULRunner. It in fact in many ways is a precursor to XULRunner in concept and functionality.
In VB, VC++, even Delphi you can make a ‘browser object’ and have your standalone application use trident as it’s renderer with only five or six lines of code!
The problem with this is that a LOT of those old programs break or have… unusualy/unexpected behaviors on IE7/newer. Back when IE7 was released it was funny when even some antivirus and security softwares broke! McAfee, Symantec and PC-Trend all used Trident to render their dialogs in older versions… which is REALLY funny if you think about having your antivirus relying on a working copy of IE6/earlier.
… and that’s the big boys; think about all the little in-house crapplets written a decade ago the current staff might not even understand the code for but an entire business could hinge on.
That’s before we even talk windows mobile where just two years ago the MOST RECENT VERSION OF IE was 5.5 and today the MOST RECENT VERSION OF IE is 6.0 (though I’m not sure about Win7 mobile). What, did you miss the 6 on 6 party just a couple years back? That’s ok, so did everyone else.
Though your pointing the finger at developers for doign their JOB was more than a little offensive. Oh yes, it’s the developers fault for actually supporting the users. Failing to still support IE6 or even 5.5 (I’m not talking pixel perfect, I’m talking a usable if degraded website) comes down to either being lazy, ignorant, or both. There isn’t one blasted USEFUL thing you can do on a page in the latest browsers you cannot accomplish in IE6 and probably 5 – if you come up with something, it’s probably NOT essential to the functionality of 99% of websites or couldn’t be done a simpler, better or more accessible manner.
OF COURSE, if people would stop jumping the gun on draft technologies, STOP bloating out their pages with hundreds of megs of javascript for NOTHING, STOP letting the art ***s demand impractical layout elements with their “Accessibility, what’s that?” attitude and/or ignorance, STOP using tens to hundreds of k of markup and CSS for every k of actual content like we were still getting paid by the K-LoC…
You always hear the “its’ too hard” or “it takes too long” argument. If it takes you more than fifteen to twenty minutes extra during the testing phase of building your layout, you are either ice-skating uphill with some “gee ain’t it neat” nonsense you shouldn’t be wasting code on in the first place, or have so completely missed the POINT of modern HTML/CSS the entire thing should be thrown out and started over from scratch ANYWAYS.
Time and time again you’ll see people with completed sites and layouts coming to forums like this one going “But it works in FF” or “It works on my Mac” or worst of all “But the Dreamweaver preview pane” – just like how six years ago EVERYONE was saying “But it works in IE” – net improvement ZERO!!! If you aren’t testing across all browsers (and with virtual machines like VPC, VMWare or VirtualBox and AMP in a Box software like XAMPP there’s NO EXCUSE) as you go as you build the layout – then it’s hardly a shock you might end up using a technique that doesn’t work cross browser. If you’ve built your entire layout without even testing? /FAIL/
But of course people will still just keep vomiting up HTML 3.2, slap a HTML 4 tranny doctype on it or WORSE call it HTML 5, using presentational classnames missing the point of CSS, taking every sleazeball shortcut in the book to blazes with doing the job you are allegedly being paid for…
I’ll stop now before I break into profanity at my DISGUST TO THE POINT OF NAUSEA over the industry as a whole.
Forget it, you can’t interact with it, you can’t rely on it’s pictures to actually be the versions of the browsers it claims, and it takes too blasted long for it to update for serious development work.
Do yourself a favor, download Oracle VirtualBox, find yourself a old XP CD and a dead computer with a XP label on it (old XP licenses, dime a dozen), install a real version of XP and the tredosoft standalones and/or multiple native installs (I run 98, 2k and XP for testing 5.5, 6 and 7 respectively, and linsux to see how FF and Opera behave on freetype, and OSX to test it’s myriad of browsers all under Win7) to test the real deal, instead of some crappy still picture of it.
Blasphemy around these parts, but I’ve found sites like browsershots to be broken, buggy, unreliable and too slow for actual development work.
IE6? What’s that? 
I always tried to stay away from hacks. Now I don’t bother thinking about IE6.
Can someone recommend a repository of IE6 hacks?
Although I was told otherwise, my boss has now changed his mind and wants me to factor IE6 into our projects.