the bane of many designers life the fact that a large percent of people are still using outdated software to browse the internet such as ie6. In fact the majority of the people browsing my site use IE6 I use a stats program to keep in touch with what people are viewing on my site so I can at some point put that to good use and do something with my site that will help people view elucidation-art with more ease.

Internet Explorer 6 5255
Internet Explorer 7 2658
Firefox 3 2468
Firefox 2 955
Opera 297
Safari 275
Firefox 259
Internet Explorer 5 253
Internet Explorer 8 197
and more….

just a peek at some of my stats, so why are so many people still using IE6? and WHY do so many people hate other people using them?

I can’t really answer the first question, that can only really be answered by people who use it. The second one… and as there are so many people using ie6 who view my site let me give you some insight (this may be biased), as with most programs Microsoft likes to be different, ie6 uses a different rendering agent to display websites, which means you can code something in firefox or opera even ie8 it looks great, exactly how it is meant to look, however when you come to view it in ie6 BAM everything is dis aligned, backgrounds aren’t where they are meant to be, ie6 doesn’t even comply to web standard validation rules so even if you code a website with perfect validation, css, and html everything could be perfect but when opening it in ie6 you have no guarantee it will look right.

Some solutions is to write the site twice, once for validation and another with ie6 hacks. which can be a total pain in the backside or the other option is to force people into updating their browsers before they can view your site… See I like this idea, firstly it brings people up to date, and it also stops people from viewing your site which means they are missing out on something although the argument behind that is that people don’t miss what they don’t know so if you stop being from viewing your sites what will they care!

if there is anyone out there that wants to share they reasons for using IE6 I would love to hear about it, like I said the majority of people who view this site use ie6? I realize that some people have copies of windows and don’t want to update their browsers, but that is what things like Firefox are fore you don’t need to update your Internet exploder, you can just use a completely different programme altogether, Firefox is an amazing browsers, along with Google chrome, and opera, they aren’t massively blotted with add-ons.

so can anyone contribute?

oh and PS I now have a twitter page if anyone wants to join me I’ll follow you back @DeeClinch