Charanjit Chana

The figures are in and one thing that continues to surprise me is the market share IE6 still enjoys. Yes it's in decline, but I am just amazed that more than 20% of those browsing the web are making do with such a poor piece of software. Weirdly, I don't know anyone that uses it and wouldn't instantly remove them from my circle of friends if they refused to upgrade to IE7 at least!

• September 2008
• Internet Explorer 7 26.3%
• Internet Explorer 6 22.3%
• Google Chrome 3.1%
• Firefox 42.6%
• Mozilla 0.5%
• Safari 2.7%
• Opera 2.0%

Apple and Opera must be wondering what they have to do to get their market share to grow. Safari renders fonts beautifully, even on a PC, but they have been leapfrogged by Chrome which is still in beta and in it's first month!

I still use Firefox at work, but half of the team I work with use Chrome. I can't wait for the Mac version because it is a nice piece of software.

Alex Mauzon has come up with a great way to combat the omission of the :first-child and :last-child pseudo classes in IE6. Using CSS expressions, you can run a simple check for items that need to adhere to the same rules.

Where you would use the following for standards compliant browsers:

element:first-child {
  background-color: red;
}

For IE6, you can simply use the following to check for a previous sibling:

element {
  background-color: expression(this.previousSibling==null?'red':'green');
}

The above checks for a previous sibling and where there are none, the background color is red, where there are previous siblings (every other item), the background color is green. Similarly, you can just use the following to re-create the :last-child pseudo-class:

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Internet Explorer 6 is possibly the single biggest pain in my life. I can cope with anything else that's thrown at me, but development time being doubled, if not tripled, because of IE6 is just something that really tests my love of web development.

I deliberately didn't develop for IE6 when building this blogging platform because I feel that I have a responsibility to promote better browsing. As a web developer, I do understand the need for backwards compatibility, but when a new version is released, it should be embraced. Plus, it's a FREE upgrade, whether you go from IE6 to 7, to Firefox, Opera or even Safari! The fact that so many people still use IE6 is a bit of a joke. It's around 10 years old, has well known security issues, is poor at doing what it's supposed to do and just simply doesn't work!

Forget the box model issues, forget the JavaScript issues and the lack of support for PNGs and even the ridiculous reliance on ActiveX controls, the 3 pixel bug is possibly the dumbest and most annoying thing that IE has in it's code. These 3 pixels that can quite simply ruin a perfect layout. 3 pixels that go unnoticed with dummy content throughout development and testing, but surface as concerns from clients when real content is introduced.

There are some 'accepted' fixes, but I seem to have stumbled across another!

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As a follow up to my previous post on stopping development for IE6, I thought I'd share my knowledge of all the 'dirty' hacks that I'd picked up for IE6 and IE7.

They're not really 'dirty', but they're not always considered to be the best method because they cause your CSS to fail validation. For me however, they're just as effective as the conditional comment that people use to exploit IE's 6 & 7 to behave in the way they like.

I have used them many times, but have recently tried to switch to the conditional comment method. I do use them during development though, because I can just dump them into the CSS and HTML through the Firebug toolbar and I don't have to constantly switch between stylesheets

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That's it. No more. I don't have the time or patience to do it anymore.

Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be developed for. Well, by me anyway. Some of my most recent projects have doubled in development time because of IE6. As a result of this wasted time, I've decided to stop and just add a bit of code to each of the new builds I do.



The above shows how it will appear. A simple bit of code that only IE6 reads and displays. It may seem 'lazy' on my part, but in almost any other industry, doubling your work load just for a shrinking demographic to make the most of your product, you'd be asked to phase it out as soon as possible

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