I redesigned my website, adhered to the XHTML standards, validated on the W3C validator and everything went alright, now the last step, cross-browsers compatibility tests.
First step, I need to look at the previous stats to learn what browsers are support-worthy. And? Surprise, surprise! IE6 is still alive with quarter of the IE users! But why?! My blog is targeted at the IT pros which are expected to be on modern browsers.
Back in the first half of this decade, Microsoft knocked out the real last competitor, Netscape Navigator (which is now, funnily enough, uses the IE engine) and IE6 became the dominant browser on the internet. Then Microsoft thought, should we upgrade this uncompliant, bugy browser which has no competitors? And probably you know the answer. IE6 was born on August 2001 and IE7 was released on late 2006, that is 5 long years for such a critical software. I would think MS would had left it to live longer if not for Firefox. Even more, Microsoft is rushing into IE8 which is claimed to have standards better compatibility by passing the ACID2 test.
IE6 was preventing the web from moving forward with lots and lots of CSS and XHTML bugs. All the important XHTML and CSS updates that have been released years ago are not implemented, therefore as a developer or a designer you can't use them and you are stuck with what IE6 states.
I expected to find much less IE6 user and I even promised in a previous post that I won't test for it, however, I am very flexible :) So while feeling disgusted, once again, I had to comply with IE6 and do some CSS hacks to make IE6 happy. I have also posted these pie charts which are collected by Google Analytics on adamtibi.net for the public benefit.
Final word, I am not a Firefox fan, but thank you Mozilla, you saved the web.