Personally, I have a harder time supporting Firefox than any version of IE. The most complicated thing for Firefox is a Rich Text Editor. I cannot tell you how many editors I went through to get one to work with Firefox. I have had Firefox upgrades break rich text editors as well. One day it works, next day, bam, I have to spend half the day fooling around with something that should work, but doesn't.
Hard core programming geniuses, this is no problem for them but there was a day when the 'world wide web' was supposed to be this easy thing to put information online. It's moving far away from that especially with a crazy w3c 'validator' that says 'hey you have 100 errors!' when not a single error exists and the page(s) work fine in every reasonable browser to test with.
Wordpress, Joomla, etc. seem to have no problem with this. I've implemented FCKeditor and TinyMCE without issue.
There's content-editable now too, which should make things simple: just mark a section of text as editable, edit in the browser and resubmit the page back to the server (nope not tried it yet).
"any version" - hmm, really? You should be coding to standards compliance first, not to MSIE, perhaps that's the issue??
Because to recommend that people leave IE6 is to work together with Microsoft (a company which has no more desire to keep supporting IE6 than anyone else) rather than making a large and powerful enemy.
Because anyone who is still using IE6 is statistically likely to have reasons (real or imagined) for sticking with browsers in the IE family. Why fight that, when the payoff for merely getting them out of IE6 is so great?
And because any program to get people to switch browsers subtly encourages people to try something other than IE. 100% of the world's IE6 users are IE users, but less than 100% of world's former IE6 users are IE users.
I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, but it's because 7 & 8 are much more standards compliant and take way less time to hack on to get working. Plus they have a huge market share.
I think he means why not get rid of IE all together? 7 & 8 are more standards compliant than 6 (which isn't saying much), but they still are lagging behind Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.
Depends what you mean by 'standards'. 7 & 8 support more of CSS 2.1 than the other browsers.
I believe support for CSS3 is lacking because they didn't want to write to a draft, and then have to support no-longer-standard extensions when the draft changed.
Completely anecdotal, and kind of a throwback to the Netscape days, but in recently redoing our site, the main things that I had to fix to get things working with IE 8 were actually bugs in our HTML. There was only one issue that we had where the fault wasn't ours.
I'm sure that IE8 is still comparatively the bottom of the barrel, but the gap seems to have narrowed pretty significantly. (Incidentally, IE7 still gave us large enough problems that we decided to just set things up so that it degraded reasonably when using IE7.)
Look at the bottom of the page - "Weebly" and, more importantly, "free website". If all goes well, this domain should get a ton of incoming links - which should give Weebly a lot of weight for the keyword "free website".
I don't mean this as a criticism in any way, btw - if you can save the world and benefit at the same time, so much the better :)
I think the best strategy is to display a message warning your site may not work on IE6 and simply stop testing IE6. If it works, great, if not -- too bad. Going out of your way to block people who very likely have no control over the browser they're using at work just seems pointless. Most IT departments aren't going to feel pressure to upgrade based on their employees wanting to use non-work related sites. A better strategy would be to include a scary warning about IE6 being unsafe. This might at least shame some IT departments into upgrading. It works... I'm being shamed into buying legit SSL certs for intranet sites because I'm sick of people complaining about the scary warnings you get from self signed certs these days.
It really sucks to design for IE6 but to make purposely make a site that breaks in IE6 is so bad for accessibility. If your CSS messes things up in IE then at least just displayed unstyled semantic HTML. At least the user will be able to access the content which should be what matters most.
How many of the member sites have this implemented already? I don't see the code on Weebly, Posterous, or Disqus. I'm sure this isn't a drop everything, must-have, showstopper feature, but it might be good to implement it before you start telling people you do :)
Hard core programming geniuses, this is no problem for them but there was a day when the 'world wide web' was supposed to be this easy thing to put information online. It's moving far away from that especially with a crazy w3c 'validator' that says 'hey you have 100 errors!' when not a single error exists and the page(s) work fine in every reasonable browser to test with.