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It is time for the web design community to take a stand and stop supporting Microsoft Internet Explorer 6! That’s right, I said it, as many have said before me, and yet somehow, most web designers still cross-browser test in IE6. Well, guess what, I’ve stopped. Okay, not completely. With my freelance clients, I will probably still check IE6, because truthfully, many of my clients themselves still run IE6. However, at my fulltime job as the web designer for College Prowler we have officially stopped supporting IE6! So why did I push for this, and how are we handling it?

So, some quick stats on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. IE6 was launched by Microsoft in 2001. Though it has had some minor updates since it’s initial launch, you know that doesn’t change anything, especially because some people out there are still using that first launched version! IE6 came standard on every Windows machine since then until IE7 was launched in 2006. Now last time I checked (aka when this post was written) it was late 2009. IE6 has been out of date since it’s inception, but has definitely been out of date since it was replaced by IE7 over 3 years ago. So how it is that still approximately 5% of internet users still use IE6? Well sadly, Microsoft does not require, or even really push users to update, especially in the olden days. I grabbed that 5% estimate off of Google Analytics for my own site, College Prowler, and a few of my freelance clients. Though the percent is slowly falling, it will be around for a while I’m sure. So, based off of the small percentage, which is slowly falling, and the fact that cross-browser testing IE6 occupies at least 50% of my cross-browser testing time

The irony of it all is that even Microsoft is desperate for users to upgrade off of IE6 to IE7 or IE8. This of course begs the question, how stupid do you have to be to still run IE6!?! At least 90% of the display bugs I’m aware of are solely IE6 problems. Entire blog articles are devoted to listing bug fixes for IE6. Well, based off of all of those stats, our company finally let me move away from IE6. We put up a warning (only visible to IE6 users) that we don’t support IE6. We even included a link to download IE8, but somehow I don’t think that’s gonna do anything. I’m just glad to be done with it!

So if you know what’s good for you as a web designer, forget IE6! The more people that stop supporting it, the faster people will switch off of it, and the faster we’ll be rid of that evil browser that has trouble outputting today’s beautiful websites. Of course, if you are still making websites with red text on a blue background, maybe you should still be testing in IE6…

If you are making a website, you absolutely need to test it across browsers. This need increases even more when you use CSS heavily for your layout and other styling. Why you ask? Well, different browsers read CSS differently. In particular, Internet Explorer (IE) is awful because Microsoft doesn’t feel the need to ascribe to web standards. So here are some suggestions to get your started with your cross-browser testing:

1. Download every major browser to test your site in. Essentially, you should be working with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. Opera is used by about 3% of internet users, and is the least common of the five mentioned here. There are also other browsers, but usually you need to stop somewhere, and I think Opera is a good place to end.

It might help to set yourself up with Google Analytics so you can know what percentage of your users are using what browsers. It will even break it down further into what version your users have, which brings me to my next point.

2. Make sure to test both IE7 and IE6. Internet explorer 6 and 7 are vastly different. Soon, IE8 will be out of beta testing and will be yet another version that needs to be tested. This is the biggest pain you’ll encounter. IE7 is actually pretty good at complying with web standards, but IE6 is like a death trap. The problem here is obviously you are only allowed to have one version of Internet Explorer on your browser at any given time. So, either install a virtual machine (much to techie for myself) or keep setup files for both IE6 and IE7 around, and just uninstall and reinstall (which is annoying, but it does the trick). Why must we go through such painful agony just to make sure our site looks good? Well, sadly, too many PC users don’t let Windows automatically update for them, leaving about 25% of IE users still with version 6. This is of course sensitive to the date of this post and will slowly decrease. Overall, in the past 6 months, I’ve found users of my company’s website go from about 18% IE6 users to 14%, which isn’t even statistically significant. Bottom line, test in both because they are vastly different!

3. Try out some of the free cross-browser compatibility testing tools out there. There are a lot of them, but most just want your money, and most aren’t very great if they are free. Short of shelling out some money, your best bet is probably browsershots.org. However, last I checked they limit you to one page (with every browser imaginable though). However, this requires you to have your site live when you test, whereas installing the browsers on your computer allows you to test offline.

4. Keep an eye out for common errors with specific browsers. The more you test, the better feel you’ll get for the flaws of different browsers. You’ll learn that the default margin on paragraph tags is different in IE than it is in other browsers. You’ll learn that min-height and min-width attributes do not function on IE6. As you come to figure out these flaws, you’ll be able to preempt them by writing clean and efficient CSS. This doesn’t completely eliminate the need to cross-browser test, but it certainly will make the process go a lot quicker.

When I was studying at CMU, I learned the mantra of usability research, “The user is not like me”. It is so true that it’s cliche, but it also applies to web design. You just can’t assume that your users see the same thing as what you see unless you go about finding out how they see it! Different browsers display code differently. Account for all your users or suffer the consequence and lose some of them to layout bugs…