Sean Neprud

Are you using Internet Explorer 6 to look at this website?

If you are, you might think I am an incompetent web designer. (You may also just know that you are using bad software, but I’ll get to that)

Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) still has a considerable amount of people using it. The numbers range from just under 15% of users to just over 30% of users using IE6, depending on which source you check.

Of course, IE6 is the browser that many businesses have decided is their official supported browser, so many people in Corporate America use IE6. This is very frustrating for those of us that know better, but are required to use certain software.

So why is this site jacked?

IE6 has a bug (one of many) that doubles the margin on floated elements. The columns on this site are “floated”, so that they can be displayed next to each other. There are also margins between them and the side of the page, so that they will be spaced properly. IE6 doubles these margins, which squeezes out one of the columns, because there isn’t enough room on the page. The last column ends up underneath the other columns.

Why does IE6 double these margins? This practice is clearly counter to the specifications for HTML and CSS, the programming languages that this determine what you see in your browser.

IE6 is just bad software that holds back the web. It is the stupid kid in the classroom that holds back all the smarter kids from moving on to the next lesson.

I recommend using Firefox or Chrome, but even upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 or 8 will fix a lot of the problems.

Maybe I’ll get around to including some hacks to get around this into the code for this site, but really, should I have to hack my site so it looks vaguely how it should in a browser as widely used as IE6?