Developing for IE6?

In this article you’ll learn if it still worth developing for IE6 and what tools are available if you choose so.

Part one – should we still develop IE6 compatible websites?

Among the world of web designers, IE is a pain to work with. It’s buggy, not standard and we’re forced to write hacks.

There is about 5 different major web browsers out there. It takes time, thus money, to develop websites that work correctly on almost all of them. Add the previous versions of each browser to the list and you’ll have to make websites compatible with about 11 browsers! In a dream world, we could imagine that all of these browsers are standards compliant and the newer versions only support new standards. In the real world, the browsers that are standards compliant (Firefox 3, Opera 9.51 and Konqueror 3.5.7) occupy an anectdotal place within the “most used browsers” ranking. The less standards compliant being the widest spread and used; IE. Have look at this table, to see how bad IE treats CSS standard (don’t even think about javascript): quirk modes

So, from a developer point of view, to stop developing for IE is the smartest choice. But what would that mean? Dirty looking websites and forms that don’t work, mostly. But then, who would care?

Maybe let’s see who the users are. I have the chance to access the Google Analytics stats of websites that have about 500′000 visits/months. From these stats, I can profile the average user. And the conclusion is; IE6 is not dead.

87% use IE

33% use IE6

There is a debate among web developers whether or not we should stop supporting IE6.

IE6 is alive because we keep supporting this browser. By forcing people to upgrade and let them see how ugly the sites look with IE6, it will be dead soon.

An approach is to display a warning message to all users using IE6 that they should update their browser.

If I walk in a user’s shoes, the sky is not bright:

• IE7 is an upgrade from IE6, the standard version that ships with XP is still IE6. Unless you ask for, it will not upgrade.
• most users are no tech geeks, asking (or more accurately forcing) them to install a new browser is way over the head of many;  going through the installation process and learning a new browser UI. If they know at all what a browser is.
• big companies have slow updates process. It takes years before a new OS is spread among the company and for something as minor as a browser update (from an IT pov), it can takes even longer.
• a lot of users are not allowed to install programs on their machine, especially within major companies. And my Google Analytics stats tell me that most people are browsing from work.

Now the choice depends on how much your business rely on your website. If you remove IE6 of your compatible browsers list, keep in mind that 33% of users might have troubles displaying it.

In case you choose to live with IE6, the second part lists a lot of tools to test and debug your website.

Part two – how to develop for IE6

The first difficulty we’re facing is testing our website on the various versions of IE, because you cannot have all of them installed on the same machine. Yet, some solutions exist:

• IE tester is a tool that allows you to emulate your website from IE5.5, IE6, IE7 and IE8.
• IE6, IE7 and IE8 XP VPC are virtual machines with evaluation copy of XP running respectively all the versions of IE

I worked with both and the VPC version is my favorite one. IE tester proved to be buggy and doesn’t always display the result correctly. It’s already painful to write the code twice, so it might at least correct something. The downside of VPC is that it takes space, ressources and is time limited. For instance, the current VPC expires on 25, December 2008. If you’re working in a company, it’s an excellent idea to have these instance running on a server so every web developer and developer can test the compatibility without having to go through the painful process of (re)installation.

Now that you know your content doesn’t show correctly in IE, what to do? Firefox has a lot of developer tools that makes it the prefered platform for web developer. There’s also a few one for IE. A must have, actually:

• debugBar is a plugin that gives you full control over the webpage. It comes with the HTTP, DOM, Javascript inspector and  HTML validator.
• Companion.JS is a Javascript debugger for IE.
• Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar , is an addon for Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 that aims to aid in design and debugging of web pages.

Now let’s code and debug!

Tags: developement