How I deal with IE6 December 6, 2009

All web developers have to take into consideration Internet Explorer 6 at some point during a build, catering for the browser requires extra development and will therefore increase the time and money spent on a project, which can deter some. However as most clients will want their site to provide the same experience to as many users as possible, you can’t afford to ignore it. In this post I’m going to detail some of the methods I use to deal with one of the most troublesome browsers out there.

IE Tester

http://my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

This is a test browser that emulates the following IE browsers: IE 5.5, 6, 7 and 8, which I use for testing builds. Unfortunately this testing browser is only available on Windows based machines, however it does run on the three major operating systems; XP, Vista and 7. Their is an alternative option called multiple Internet Explorers which found here http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE this allows you to install multiple versions of the IE browser on your PC however unlike IE tester it only works on Windows XP.

Due to the tabbed layout of IE tester, allowing you to render the different browser versions in the same window on different tabs I prefer this option. IE Tester isn’t fool proof, and I would always recommend finding a PC running a version IE 6 as it’s default browser over it, however it gives you a good indication of general IE6 errors such as the double margin bug.

CSS browser selector

http://rafael.adm.br/css_browser_selector/

This is a piece of javascript which gives you the ability to write specific CSS code for each operating system and each browser. Allowing you to specify IE6 specific styles without the use of conditional comments, this is how I deal with those tricky bugs which cannot be solved with additional lines of css such as display: inline.

It is also worth noting that it may be possible to ignore the browser completely, I recommend looking at a site’s analytics before starting a new design/build. For example my website only got 60 visits from users using IE6 last month whereas I had 3,501 visitors using Firefox, this had led me to drop support for IE6 on my site.