Incase you didn't know already i'm a web designer (and developer) and something all web designers come across at least once during the design of a website is cross-browser compatibility and i'm sure you can ask any website designer what they think of IE6 (Internet Explorer 6 - keep up with the acronyms) and they would throw so many obscenities at you that you would most likely cry.

It's no lie that web designers hates Internet Explorer especially Internet Explorer 6, simply because it has trouble rendering the simplest of things and when it does it normally renders them incorrectly. Below is my breakdown of common problems i face with the 3 versions of IE.

Internet Explorer 6

• No PNG Transparency
• Absolute Positioning Often Never Works
• Margin and padding often cause weird positioning problems
• Doesn't support some tags or CSS correctly

Internet Explorer 7

• Margin and padding often cause weird positioning problems

Internet Explorer 8

They have an option to force IE7 so i do that if i find a problem, that way i can solve the problem for IE7 and IE8 together.

These problems are compared to Firefox who seems to manage HTML and CSS very well, sure they may not render them correctly but they allow a lot more to be done with HTML and CSS and also allow me to debug quicker with Firebug.

Should We Support 3 Internet Explorers?

This is something that has been thrown around since IE8 was released to the world, do we really need to support 3 different versions of IE and then Chrome/Safari (Webkit) and Firefox.

No one really had a solid answer about what to do, however i was having a quick read through John O'Nolan's blog posts and found a video (from an experiment he was doing) and found something he said very interesting and summed it up very well.

Only support what your visitors use

This was the perfect answer to the question i thought because why should i support IE6 if only 2% of my visitors use it, surly it's better for me to only support what the visitors use and this is something that all designers and website owners really need to consider because a truer word has never been said.

A Look At My Statistics

Like all websites (i hope) i keep track of visitor patterns so that i can better improve my website and i use my statistics in a very similar way to the point John O'Nolan made, to write about things my visitors are interested in.

After hearing what John said about browser support i figured it was worth me checking my statistics and seeing exactly what sort of numbers use what browsers, obviously it wouldn't be fair for me to use all statistics from my website from the day it started because it would give the different browser an unfair advantage over the others.

I was a little surprised at what i found as expected the majority of my visitors to be using Firefox, this was not the case at all. I have outlined different statistics below for 3 of my major websites to give you an idea of what browsers people are using for which websites.

Statistics - slater.john

The best way for me to show you my statistics is to simply screenshot my Google Analytics report for the last month which shows you the percentages of people using various browsers.

One aspect that affects the outcome of these results is the type of website, obviously a technology targeted website is going to drive more traffic through Firefox browsers as this is the browser of choice for more tech savvy people. One problem i face though i decided what type of website I run because it is a blog that has a little bit of everything, i decided calling this a technology website was not fair so took to the statistics and looked at where most of my traffic was going to for the last month (the same period of traffic for the browser statistics). It was clear to me that after looking at the statistics that most of the traffic was being driven to V Festival posts, so it is safe to call the site a ‘Music’ site for these statistics.

It is clear that Internet Explorer is the most popular browser with my visitors with quite a large margin and this is something i was extremely shocked about because i always considered my audience to be the tech savvy kind, obviously this can change depending on content and this is exactly what happened.

Unsatisfied with the results i decided to choose results from a larger period of time before my initial V Festival post, these statistics showed a whole different story.

Statistics - Feed Mailer

It's quite easy to give Feed Mailer an audience genre because the website is built around RSS/XML and this is clearly going to be a geeky audience, so that is the audience type i have given it.

The results for Feed Mailer are very clear that Firefox is the more popular browser with over 55% of visitor using it, which is a good thing considering the website doesn't work very well in Internet Explorer. Something that was quite a shock was how Google Chrome (a very new browser) as surpassed Safari in the visitor market. Something that surprised me even further is that around 90% of the people using Safari use Safari on the Mac, so i think this is a clear indication that Safari on the PC isn't as popular as i expected.

Statistics - PSP Desktops

This is another hard website to give a audience genre because it is unclear what genre the website is, personally i would consider the website aimed at more of a tech audience, however the PSP is a games console and owned by many younger people so i may have to generalise the website is simply an image website. After all the website contains images that can be saved and used as a background on the PSP games console by Sony.

Versions To Support

On all 3 of the websites i too a deeper look into the versions people were using and it was clear that IE6 was the least used of the 4 versions i got results for.

• Internet Explorer 7 - 60%
• Internet Explorer 8 - 25%
• Internet Explorer 6 - 10%

I think it is clear that Internet Explorer 6 can be depreciated against the other Internet Explorer Browser Versions.

Conclusion

Internet Explorer still plays a major part of my traffic sources and it would be foolish of me to stop support Internet Explorer altogether, however i see no problem in writing off Internet Explorer 6 as it's value has decreased a lot, it doesn't support a lot of what new website require to stay on trend and it is also very old, like with old people, IE6 should be put in a home where it will spend the rest of its life.

Microsoft says “Stop Killing Fat Americans with IE6, get IE8 MURDER!”

Recently Microsoft launched a campaign to save hungry americans called "Browse For The Better" where they give 8 meals to over-weight, hungry and disgusting americans for every download of Internet Explorer 8. Although they may be preventing these hungry americans from dying, they are not really helping web designer which is very irresponsible, so i urge web designer to unite and start our own campaign titled "Browser For The Better by downloading IE8 then immediately deleting it and downloading Firefox."

Browse For Better! & Browser For The Better by downloading IE8 then immediately deleting it and downloading Firefox.

Point To Stress

Download Firefox, or at the very least download the new Internet Explorer and spot being an American killing noob.

Keywords: ie6, ie8, ie7, internet explorer, microsoft, browser, web design, html, css, firefox