IE6

Say No to IE6 the Drupal Way

Submitted by mgifford on

There's just so much great stuff going on with modern browsers, mobile devices and HTML5, so how does the Drupal community our our best to help innovation by encouraging IE6 users to upgrade to a modern browsing experience.  Now Drupal 7 (core) is still will be providing support for IE6, but we really don't want to have to support it for Drupal 8 (which could well be released before IE6 is finally laid to rest by Microsoft).   I've written a short note that we're using for our visitors to give them the tools that they need to finally make the move.  However, I thought I should document a nice way to do this in Drupal 7.  Much of this will be the same for Drupal 6.

Now there are ways to do browser detection with jQuery or other tools, but for Drupal 7 the easiest way seems to be to add a conditional CSS file to the header through the template.php file. The conditional statements work fine for IE 6 & 7, so they do the trick nicely:

The Government of Canada Stops Supporting IE6

Submitted by mgifford on

I'm happy to hear of the Government of Canada's recent announcement that they will no longer be supporting Interent Explorer 6.  This is not an easy decision as many government departments chose to develop applications for a single proprietary browser rather than based on international standards. It will be expensive to retrofit many outdated systems, but it is important to fix what is widely understood to be tragically short term thinking.

Although IE6 held considerable market share historically, many security problems are causing governments around the world to officially drop support of this old browser. Both hackers & foreign government agents are able to hack the system to gain access to critical systems in governments and business.

Google's reduction of support for IE6, starting last month, is also a consideration. So many Web 2.0 tools are connected to Google these days and with the government looking to connect more with it's citizens, this is going to be a problem.

Zen issues with IE and CSS

Submitted by mgifford on

One of our development sites was having trouble rendering in IE 6. It was previously browser tested-- everything checked out! Suddenly a tester comes back with the infamous comment (you might know it well): "the site doesn't render properly in IE6".

For most of us, this means several hours pouring over code trying to root out the problem CSS. If you are on a Mac, or a PC which doesn't allow IE6, this is especially painful.

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