As any web developer knows, Internet Explorer 6 is one of the worst things on this planet.  It ranks right between genocide and nuclear war for me.  I want to use this post to think out loud about how we (developers) might be able to expedite the gradual adoption of more modern browsers.  First, what's wrong with IE6 (and IE 7 to a lesser extent)?

• Weird html and css behavior - It is very common to create a new page that works fine in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera just as you'd expect.  Then you load the page in IE and it's a mess.  Similarly, if you try to fix the problems in IE, the page is broken in every other browser.
• Missing css features - with any other browser, you can enter something like "[type=text]" to select all text inputs.  You can use CSS to make rounded corners on the fly.  You can use background images with alpha transparency.  None of these things work with IE.
• No javascript debugging - The IE javascript engine is slow and unpredictable, but the main problem is that the browser tells you next to nothing when there is a javascript error.  In Firefox or Chrome it takes about 5 seconds to find exactly what line is causing a problem and why.  In IE I often end up systematically commenting out different lines of code to figure out what's causing the error and it takes forever.
• A million other things - I could go on and on but you get the idea.

Maybe you're thinking, "You're a web developer.  It's your job to deal with this.  Why should I care?"  The answer is that if me and my kind didn't have to waste half our days supporting browsers that no one should be using in the first place, we could put out much better software.  Web applications are years behind where they should be because we programmers can't actually use all the cool new tools available to us.  CSS and javascript are advancing to keep up with our needs but we can't use the advances because well over half of all internet users are still using IE.  This hurts everyone.

So what am I suggesting?  Well, in a perfect world, every major website would just stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 and maybe even IE 7 too.  Imagine if half of the world went to google and saw a page saying "Your browser sucks. Here are some links to free downloads for much better browsers."

That won't happen.  OK, well the next best option would be for google to make a deal with Dell and the other computer manufacturers.  The type of people using IE6 only use it because they don't care enough to change (or they don't know how).  That means if all computers came with Chrome as the default browser, no one would bother switching back to Internet Explorer.

Hopefully this happens soon, but I'm not the type of person to sit around waiting for something to happen.  So what can I do to help speed up the transition to real browsers?  Well, I'm seriously considering disabling IE6 on all my personal sites (including this one I suppose).  I might have fewer people using the sites, but I could provide a much nicer experience for the remaining users.

What I'm really looking for is something that I can do at work.  A lot more people see the websites I make for my company than my personal ones, but it would be irresponsible of me to do anything that could possibly drive away users.  So here's what I'm wondering.  What happens if every single page has something at the top nicely asking users to switch browsers without forcing anything? Something like:

Would this make people switch without driving away any users?  I think so.  The problem is that there would still be a bunch of people that don't switch and we'd still have to support those users.   So this helps but it doesn't really fix anything unless the company is bold enough to tell IE6 users "tough luck" at some point.  Small companies would be more willing to do this if a couple of major tech giants lead the way, but right now this couldn't possibly happen where I work.

There is one small thing I've been doing.  I've been using css to round corners and style buttons, etc.  These styles will work correctly in every major browser except for IE 6 and 7.  Basically, the site looks nicer for people that aren't stuck in the stone ages.  None of the IE users will know that they're missing out, but that's not the point.  I'm no longer willing to hold back improvements that can be made without breaking IE.  Instead of catering to the lowest common denominator, I'm trying to raise the bar for the browsers that can handle it.

Thoughts?