Every time I try to do anything different with CSS, IE6 laughs in my face. Mozilla and Opera handle my new code with grace. Occasionally they will play up but never in a showstopping way. But IE6? After difficulties getting it to play ball tonight with some perfectly simple code I was writing, I asked myself "Can't IE6 get anything right?". I'm trying out a new style of paragraphs, using indented first lines and no gaps between them. Mozilla, no problem. Opera, no problem. IE6, the paragraphs are too far apart, ruining the effect. OK, I can live with that. But when I then increased the text size, the paragraphs started to overlap. I had to add a CSS hack to supply IE6 with different code. I was using ems - but the only way IE6 would perform properly was to use pixels. Sigh.
As a side effect of my simple paragraph code, IE6 now refuses to draw the bottom borders of neighbouring blockquotes - unless you scroll down and back up the page. Pathetic. This browser has a terrible list of drawing bugs - content can literally disappear. (Remember the first time A List Apart redesigned in green and yellow?) Or lists can gain extra space, text can jump around, all kinds of weird shit. We can do without it.
I'm sick of this browser's shit code handling. Surf all you like with it, but designers will tell you endless horror stories of layout problems, bugs by the million and things it just can't do. Yes, Mozilla has a massive list of bugs too, but they don't get in the way when you try and code something simple and valid. I never spend hours and hours of extra time trying to get round them - unlike with IE6.
Then there are the endless cries of disgust I read all the time from people trying to make IE6 work correctly with servers. Time and again something just won't work in that browser - usually due to an unforgivable bug, where the program doesn't adhere to a required internet standard. I've had to abandon one program I installed on a website because basic forms just wouldn't work with IE6 - naturally, every other browser had no problems. After months of trying to find a solution I had to give up. Ironically, the problem only seems to affect Windows servers.
I wouldn't mind if Microsoft were continually updating and improving IE6 - you know, like other browser manufacturers, who don't even have the same resources to spend, yet manage to release regular updates with new features across a wide range of platforms - not just Windows. Microsoft should have been solving common bugs, adding missing HTML tags (IE6 doesn't even support <abbr>!) and making it ready for the standards-based future. Instead they've let it dwindle - adding only security patches, and a pop-up blocker due this summer. That is until now. Apparently the IE6 team have started work on it again, probably due to the extended delay in IE7 coming out as part of Longhorn. Or it could be the increasing use of other browsers that has finally made them take notice. (Ha, even people at Microsoft are now using Firefox!)
On a related note, The Web Standards Group have just interviewed code guru Molly Holzschlag. Here's what she had to say about the current buggy state of IE6:
I simply don't see how a company as wealthy and powerful as Microsoft cannot find the resources to address all these things, particularly with the delays we're expecting.
It's time to ditch this out-of-date browser into the dustbin of history.
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