IE6 is a broken browser.

Really? Many pages look fine to me

Most likely reasons are:

1. The designer has jumped through a lot of hoops and spent a lot of time correcting for IE6’s inadequacies.
2. The page actually looks wrong but because you always use IE6 you never realised.
3. The web page was built using very old techniques such as using tables for layout. Web designers avoid such techniques now because they are inflexible and not accessible, and use CSS instead.

What’s CSS?

In web pages built to modern, best-practice standards, the page layout is controlled by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). For CSS to work as intended, of course, it’s important for web designers and browser manufacturers work to the same set of guidelines (set down by the W3C), to ensure that the user experience is consistent regardless of your choice of browser.

Following those rules is a big part of designing to web standards, the best practice policy adopted by the majority of professional web designers.

CSS and IE6

With IE6, however, Microsoft decided not to follow the guidelines and to go and do its own thing. The result is that where all modern browsers show the page one way, IE6 will invariably show it differently.

Sometimes very differently indeed.

So what?

Well, web designers who have produced a clean, standards-compliant site with valid are then required to produce endless technical workarounds in order to correct for IE6’s many, many deficiencies. This process can add perhaps 25% a project’s development time, simply to cater for a broken browser with a market share of 20% and falling.

Increasing numbers of web services, including Facebook and Googlemail are withdrawing support for IE6 from their sites, and this is a growing trend. They simply explain (as we do) that the site will not look as good as it should when viewed using that shoddy browser.

Is there an answer?

If you are on a corporate network that has not yet upgraded past IE6, perhaps not. We do recognise that many people have no say in the browser that they use.

If you have the option, however, then we recommend changing to a different browser. At the very least, consider upgrading to IE7. This is by no means a perfect browser but it does correct a few of IE6’s more egregious transgressions.

Better yet, download one of the excellent standards-compliant browsers that are freely available. We’d recommend Firefox, Opera or Safari (our personal favourite).