Should we bring down IE6?

IE6 has been a big issue for web designers for quite a long time.  According to W3C browser statistics, there’s still quite a big chunk of people who still use Internet explorer 6 - about 20%. Due to that, most websites choose to support IE6, which makes it pretty time consuming for any web designer while working on a site. Any designer knows, that after you’re done with a site design, you’re not quite done with it, since you have to go and create an additional css file or apply certain fixes for the stuff to work in IE6, which can take hours of wild guessing sometimes. IE6 refuses to work with transparency, floating elements, hovered backgrounds, positioning elements, etc, etc, and has lots of fun bugs for the one to train his patience.

Craig Grannell from Net Magazine, UK, asked designers and developers if it’s finally time to take IE6 behind the shed and shoot it in the article Calling time on IE6 :

Many argue that IE6 hinders development, due to the number of hacks required to get sites working in it. Opera web evangelist Bruce Lawson goes further, squarely blaming IE6 for “hindering the development of the web”, due to its lack of support for advanced CSS and XHTML. Many in the industry tell such tales: horror stories of a third of a site’s development time taken up by dealing with IE6; major display issues requiring a partial site rebuild, despite everything looking fine in all other browsers; elements randomly disappearing entirely due to the ‘hasLayout’ bug. “If anything, things will get worse, since we’re now battling three versions: 6, 7 and the beta of 8,” says Tom Muller of Kleber. “They all display content slightly differently and we regularly work up a site in Firefox or Safari, only to spend a day figuring out why our valid, semantic code doesn’t render correctly in Internet Explorer.”

Read on.