Today I ran across a web designer blog supporting the idea to stop using IE hacks, to just let the browser bugs creep to the visible surface of every IE 6 user out in the web.
According to the author:
Let’s admit it, we all hate Internet Explorer 6. About 80% of our CSS debug time are spend on IE6. We all know that IE6 is outdated and has horrible CSS rendering engine. However, most average Internet users haven’t realized that yet. Why? Because we put our hard work on it and patch the bugs by various IE hacks. Well, it is time to do something…
While no one disagrees on the faults of IE 6, I cannot find it in me to agree with the solution.
Why we should not trash IE hacks:
- A huge chunk of internet users still use IE 6
- A designer’s #1 job is to communicate
- A designer who can’t build a site that communicates to the target audience won’t be in business long
As a designer, my job is to communicate. If I can’t communicate a client’s brand and message to 40% of their visitors, then should I expect to be hired? No.
Personally, I don’t find it all that hard to design for IE6 - so I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. Sure it’s a little more work, but once you know the issues, you can think about them when the design is still in the photoshop phase. I probably spend all of 15 minutes applying IE hacks to a CSS/XHTML website, it’s just not that hard.
Any professional designer can attest to the fact that they will know and hold all of the issues relating to their design medium in their subconscious while designing.
Technorati Tags: web_design, css, validating, valid_XHTML, ie6, css_hacks
August 9th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
I agree; By not supporting IE6, you’re giving your competition an edge. Users of IE6 that go to your site will think your site is broken and will instead go to a competitors site. Unfortunately this might be something designers will have to continue to deal with until the percentage of IE6 users are negligible enough.
August 9th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Exactly- one case in point is IE on the Mac. It’s been abandoned and unused long enough that my clients are comfortable with me not supporting it. It’s a pity that we had to support it down into it’s grave, however.
August 9th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Ian,
I completely agree with your points. I saw the Web Designer Wall article on Digg. After reading the article, I realized that I wasted a few minutes reading an article that was misleading designers.
Any skilled designer will love to make his web projects cross-browser compatible. IE 5.x and 6 still capture about 50% share. How can one ask to ignore 50% web surfers?!
August 10th, 2007 at 6:56 am
It’s a self-correcting problem. I would agree that the design community should take action to move end-users away from IE6 if it wasn’t going to happen naturally on its own. People get new computers that come with the latest browsers. For some people, it just takes a decade or so.
November 5th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Here’s a regularly occurring situation: We make a proposal; we assume we’ll spend time on browser compatibility (even if we need to make no true IE hacks, IE’s rendering is still the least predictable and the most costly to us in development hours); someone underbids us.
But I guess the same could be said of accessibility, standards-based design, etc. They’re things about which we have to educate clients. Not easy, especially in a smaller market.
I’m just glad most of my work is now in application development, where browser compatibility is a smaller proportion of the budget (not because it’s less important, but because we’re often working within proven designs).