Friday, January 23, 2009

Of dropping IE6

Everyone should go say hello to Doug Bowman, design god, and give him a,"Fuck, yes!" of encouragement on his decision to drop IE6 support for his newly designed site:
"IE6: the new Netscape4

This version of the site is also my first opportunity to give IE6 the proverbial finger. It was liberating to develop this site without checking my work in IE. Time for everyone to say I dropped IE6. Hello :before and :after pseudo-selectors, attribute selectors, adjacent-sibling selectors, and all kinds of other simple selector tricks that should have worked years ago in every browser.

I didn’t even check any version of IE until last night, when I figured I should at least take a peek to see how gloriously IE6 barfed all over a 10-year old CSS2 specification. Impressive, it was. For now, I’m using conditional comments to serve a custom stylesheet for IE6 just to turn off most of the styles. This seemed like the lesser evil, and at least ensures the poor souls still using IE6 can at least read my content. IE6 gets a stripped down, single-column view that will get no more attention of love after this. I’ll be able to yank those conditional comments and the entire stylesheet anytime I want. I noticed IE7 had one major problem with a negative margin, so IE7 gets its own little stylesheet too."
He also links to I dropped Internet Explorer 6, a site that really should have more than 49 sites registered.

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4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dude, your really being mean to Netscape. Netscape 4 was bad, but was it THIS bad?

7:14 PM  
Blogger The Hater said...

Netscape 4 left deep fucking scars on all who wrote DHTML at that time. It hurt to write code for, and it crashed constantly, making it hurt its users.

I still know users who preferred it over IE4 (or IE6 or IE7, for that matter), but I have yet to meet a developer from that time who doesn't shudder or outright vomit at its mention.

11:52 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

H8r-

I'm sorry I've been so busy, but this should make up for it.

http://graphjam.com/2008/08/22/song-chart-memes-web-development/

Be sure to read all the comments!

miss you

xoxo

12:51 PM  
Blogger jordan said...

It makes me said that I used Netscape 4 quite a bit, but I was 11 at the time.

5:48 PM  

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