I have been reading for a little while now about how web designers/developers plan to drop support for IE6. While I can understand the reasons behind this and I do agree with them to some extent but ultimately I will have to contest this decision.
In reality, there are two sides to this story, both of which are dependent on your target audience.
If you have a website that is not necessarily designed for a general target audience, say a website where usually only designers may visit, support for IE6 may not be necessary at all. This is due to the fact you are expecting your visitors to be up to date and anyone who isn’t most likely would not be the type of visitor you expect to stay and explore or convert.
On the other hand, if you are developing for a corporate client who sells products online, or depends on their website for a steady stream of income, no doubt the client is going to want as much traffic and conversions as possible. You cannot rely on every user having the most up to date browser, if they are unsure how to upgrade and we want to make a conversion, then it is our responsibility to make it work given what they have.
Personally, I don’t think IE6 is that bad.
Its true IE6 is outdated but I believe designers and/or developers just love throwing around how much IE6 sucks to show they “know what they are talking about.”
I can honestly say I do not run into many issues whilst developing for IE6. I have spoken to developers, who believe an entirely new stylesheet is required while developing for IE6, and I find myself dumbfounded as to why, or how, they can run into so many problems. The main issue I tend to face is a margin/padding issue which can be easily modified with a few additional lines of CSS.
//the following css would add a 10px padding to the top in all browsers
h1 {
padding:10px 0 0;
}
//lets pretend for some reason in IE6, 10px looked wrong and about 15px would look better.
//the following css would apply to only IE6
* html h1 {
padding:15px 0 0;
}
The above CSS would overwrite that particular style for the element. In this case h1. This VERY easy fix, as well as many others which help make development for IE6 almost as simple as most other browsers for all website designers.