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Why We Should All Stop Using IE6 And Bury It Deep?

Have you ever wondered why there are vastly increasing number of Web designers and developers who don’t like using Internet Explorer?
Maybe you have wondered what’s the big fuss about internet explorer and why so many people are negative towards its use?
After all; it loads pretty fast, looks okay and does the job.

I once had same opinion!

As a web developer it is part my job to ensure websites work in all major browsers. And here lies the problem. If you look at Internet Explorer, 6th version in particular, from the user point of view there is nothing wrong with it. However, IE6 is the reason why developers worldwide pull out their hair, swear at screens and in general doom IE.

When designers code a website, ideally it needs to comply with international coding rules. Websites can be designed using different languages but in general what your browser displays is a HTML code (an XHTML if you want to be up with latest standards).

Internet explorer 6, being an old browser, is rendering pages differently and does not keep up with new standards (XHTML and CSS) and is displaying pages differently, with errors, objects are shifted to wrong places etc...…
And this is the part where developer starts swearing at Microsoft. Simply because they code their website according to standards, having it tested in all OTHER major browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera, Flock or even Conqueror
on some distros of linux but it simply does not work in IE6.

This is quite frustrating because the developer has done everything as it should be, after all it works perfectly in other browsers so why does not work in IE6 ?

And tweaking and hacking of CSS coding starts in an attempt to get the site working on IE6, which still a majority of users have installed by default (in our opinion this should be down to choice and not to monopoly position).

Designers then have to spend additional hours making those tweaks work. Now imagine that your company has 5 developers and each one has to spend an extra 2 hours tweaking code that is perfectly valid! That’s 10 hours of company time wasted simply down to problems with IE6 that should not occur in the first place.

This time should be billed and sent to Microsoft!

Now the positive part! Microsoft seem to realise this and now having released

IE7 for a while, it is step toward better future. IE7 renders pages much better, with some quirks but Microsoft is promising IE8 soon with all range of features but also full compliance with standards

Empire Elements recommends following browsers:

Mozila Firefox

Very "cool" browser. Plenty of customization features, Add-ons and themes. Solid performance and compliance with standards. Security standard, recognises phishing sites and blocks popups. Completely FREE and our first choice!

Flock

so called the Social Web Browser. Full integration with socializing websites, youTube, Facebook, Flickr video streaming sites and much, much more.

Safari

something new for Windows users that MAC users have had for a whilen now. Safari is incredibly fast!

Opera

Opera has email client in-built, fast loading and plenty of widgets. Check out the mobile phone version!

IE7

does deserver our 5th place because if we are forced to have Internet explorer on our computers, lets have the IE7 !

Richard Kacerek CEO Empire Elements

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