Tuesday, 14 July 2009 at 19:24
This is happy news! Let web designers everywhere celebrate!
Developing websites that are fresh, engaging, attractive, usable and informative is no easy task at the best of times, but Internet Explorer 6 really knew how to suck the fun out of the whole thing. You could spend hours carefully crafting a wonderful drop-down menu, or lovingly arranging panes constructed from single pixel PNG transparencies… only to see your work utterly destroyed by IE6 and it’s bizarre rendering engine.
Then you knew there was a hard slog to follow appeasing the monster; getting headaches from CSS hacks, weaving in conditional comments, banging your head on DXImageTransforms… All so that one inconsiderate browser would show what everyone with Firefox or Safari could already see. Sometimes this could take as long to achieve as writing the page to begin with.
Well no more. The chain is slipping and people are finding their way to browsers like Safari, Firefox, and the latest kid on the block: Google Chrome.
Take your pick. Okay, they’re not all perfect (though Safari comes pretty close IMHO), but they’re so much better than the old days it’s incomparable. So join me in raising a glass to the fading embers of IE6. Cheers!
Of course, there’s IE8 too. But I’ve been hurt too many times.