13 February 2009

Here are a couple of things from today about our beloved web browser.

First, Dan Cederholm shows us how to employ conditional comments to hide all CSS from IE6.

[…] there are plenty of sites I’ve designed and maintain where the IE6 stats are low enough to drop the axe and move on. Now is the time!

Think about this. In just 6 years from now we’re going to have hoverboards and flying cars — and people are still using IE6.

Second, Microsoft has decided to play favorites with irresponsible web developers in IE8 by shipping it with a default setting to load a list of special websites in IE7-mode, and Andy Clarke has a few things to say about it.

Responding to a satirical remark that Andy had twittered, Chris Wilson, head of the IE development team, asked him what else he thought they could do. Andy’s correct response:

Chris, I feel for you. I really do. But what I really think is that if sites break in Internet Explorer 8, after you have done everything that you can to make that browser the best that it can be, it really isn’t your problem to solve.

Instead it’s a problem for designers and developers like me to solve.