Nick La wrote a very interesting post for trashing all IE hacks. Web designers spend a lot time on trying to “hack” their site to appear properly on Internet Explorer 6 (Internet Explorer 7 is messy too, but not as IE 6). CSS rendering in IE 6 is extremely bad and web designers have to make some tricks to make their designs (especially if they contain .png images) to appear as they should. Most of the debuging time of a designer is spent on that.
On the other hand there are many users that still use Internet Explorer 6. On Typpz Blog 51% of the users who visit us using Internet Explorer use IE 6 and 49% use IE 7. In general 32% of our visitors use IE and 52% use Firefox. But our site is technology oriented and users know about Firefox and alternative browsers. For the simple user, IE is the only way to surf (half internet users use IE 6 according to stats).
The question is: “Should web designers stop patching their sites for working on IE and advice users to update their browser?” or they should keep working hard on hacking and tricking their designs? You can answer this question by voting here.
