Briefly About the Show

Being a web developer, I realize that compatibility is an issue that I have to live with. Obviously I'd enjoy a world where you could write code one time and truly trust that every browser would render it correctly, but I know that's not an expectation I can have at this point in time. One day!

That being said, I'm going to express my outright loathing for Internet Explorer 6. This browser is responsible for allowing hundreds of viruses and exploits to do their business without warning. It does not support PNG transparency, it renders CSS like a child draws architectural schematics, and it just outright sucks.

I know some developers I've met in the past who say IE renders everything and it's the sites that use Firefox compliance that break. Uh, no. The reason IE renders everything (or used to) nicely is because it often ignores standards, rules, and other things a developer can rely on and goes about rendering a page its own way. Because it "was" the most popular browser, developers would write their code, test it in IE and if it worked, they'd call it a day.

At the time Netscape was the only real competitor and Opera was considered to be the browser that was standards compliant, but wasn't practical for every-day use because no sites worked on it.

Thank god things are changing and now even Microsoft admits that IE 6 is absurdly flawed. From what I've seen from IE 7 betas, they've fixed 90% of what ailed version 6. Of course it only took a decade and some actual competition via Firefox, Safari, and Opera to get Microsoft off its ass. Well, at least they got up.

I'm in the midst of rewriting all my sites to be standards compliant and they all work perfectly in the following browsers; Safari, Opera, Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape. They break or render weird in only one - yep, IE 6.

If you're a user and not a developer who depends on a good testing platform, please please please upgrade to the IE 7 beta. Get rid of IE 6 completely.