Internet Explorer 6? Sorry, no dice...

Way back in the dark ages of the late 90s, there was a browser named “Netscape Navigator”, which was a horrible nightmare to code for. Then came Internet Explorer, which was actually a bit better, and took the browser world by storm, mainly because it was bundled for free with Windows. After a ton of lawsuits and a few years, IE emerged as the dominant browser on the net, a position it still (unfortunately) occupies.

Fast forward a few years to 2000, and you get Internet Explorer 6.

Which sucks.

Seriously, this is no joke.

IE 6 is a giant mess, with terrible to non-existent support for standards based XHTML / CSS, terrible PNG support, proprietary plugins and code, and a horrid Javascript engine… and even worse, it’s still used today.

In 2009.

During the normal development cycle of any website, you need to make sure that the site is functional on a variety of different browsers: Firefox, Safari, etc… and Internet Explorer. IE 6 development time eats up a ridiculous amount of resources, as basic things that work everywhere else do not in IE 6, and so about half the work to ensure browser compatibility usually goes to poor old IE 6. It’s a waste, and as a result, we have not officially “supported” IE 6 in a while now. Web people hate IE6. The net is full of protest sites like www.bringdownie6.com and www.iedeathmarch.org, and Apple and Google officially do not support IE 6 for their MobileMe and Gmail product lines.

And now, Internet Explorer 8 is out — and it’s much better, as they finally decided that maybe, just maybe, following web standards is the way to go! At least it passed the Acid2 test… So in case anyone is interested, any sites we build are guaranteed functional in IE 6 - and by “functional” we mean “you can navigate through them”, not “they will display correctly”. But other than that, a halfway decent browser (Firefox, Safari) is definitely required.