A collective groan fills our room of developers at NAPC. Another Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) incompatibility with one our products has been uncovered. The preferred solution is to quit IE6, take a deep breath, and launch a different browser. Unfortunately, for a number of our customers this is not yet an option and we are faced with the challenge of trying to make an old dog (circa 2001) ignore a new trick.

In the late 90s, developing interactive websites required you to choose sides between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Each offered its own subset of exciting new features that were guaranteed to not work on the other. If you strayed from anything but the most standard HTML tags one of the browsers would fail miserably. Many stale and boring (but functional !!!) websites were born. This was also the era where all colors were picked from the limited "Web-Safe" palette to avoid dithering.   

Thanks to the adoption of standards for HTML and JavaScript, common rendering engines, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) most of these show-stopper browser incompatibility issues have gone away, leaving fewer magical incantations that the Web 2.0 developer needs to keep in their toolbox. The majority of these workarounds, unfortunately, have to do with IE6. A quick look at the style sheet for NAPC's Elegant for Xinet Portal reveals a number of hacks to fool IE6 into doing the right thing:

# Ignores the html>body line
hr.mainhr {  top: 120px;  }
html>body hr.mainhr { top: 115px; }

# Ignores the pseudo-commented line
input.btn{ width: 150px; }
/* commented backslash hack v2 \*/
input.btn{ width: 156px; }
/*end hack */


These examples are minor tweaks that take into account differences in the box model used by IE6. More serious issues arise from bugs with CSS v2, ignoring transparency in PNG files, and differences in traversing the HTML Document Object Model. The latter usually results in a breakdown of the friendlier Web 2.0 AJAX features.

And the developers groan.

We are aware that Internet Explorer 6 still commands a significant market share on corporate PCs, and wherever possible we do try and maintain some level of functionality on IE6. However, our products use a great deal of Web 2.0 technology to provide sophisticated interfaces and cutting edge design and IE6 is incapable of keeping up. To be fair, it isn't as bad as IE5 on the Mac was !

With the exciting HTML 5 spec around the corner a number of big players on the web (ex: Facebook, YouTube, Digg) are actively encouraging their users to upgrade or switch browsers. So are we.