With the redesign on its way and actually in the browser testing stage now, I’ve had the fortune to spend a few quality hours debugging IE as of late. Generally I don’t have too many un-fixable issues with the browser and any PNG issues can be easily solved with a filter or some JavaScript, but today’s pushed me over the edge.

Why it’s usually no biggie.

As I’m sure you are aware, IE 6 doesn’t fully support transparent PNGs and generally display them with ugly gray backgrounds. Generally this can be solved by using a filter that IE does support as follows:

filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src="theimage.png", sizingMethod="crop");

There’s also a brilliant solution that avoids the filter and can be used through the DD_belatedPNG script.

Why they don’t always work.

Again, up until now, I’ve never really had a PNG issue that couldn’t be solved though one of the above methods. But the DD_belatedPNG is still in alpha and, from my experience, doesn’t handle multiple PNGs too well. So in this case, that one’s out for most of my images (I decided to use it just on my logo).

The filter also has it’s own range of problems, one of which is that pages will not display until everything is loaded and IE6 has applied the filter. Generally, I’d be fine with that. But in this case, I’m pulling my lifestream into the sidebar via AJAX. If it doesn’t load, the whole site doesn’t load. In fact, the entire browser will actually freeze.

So today,

I have decided that it’s not worth it. I’ve used DD_belatedPNG on the logo, and to the people who are unfortunate enough to be using an almost 7-year-old browser, you will be seeing a couple gray backgrounds and perhaps a display: none; or two.

Oh, and of course this nice little message:

Hey there! It appears you are using Internet Explorer 6, which is almost 7 years old! This means your computer will get viruses easier and the some websites (such as this one) might look funny.

Why not upgrade your browser? You could try Mozilla FireFox (my personal favorite) or even just update to a more recent version of Microsoft IE.

To somebody used to browsing in IE6, the site looks fine. A couple PNGs not rendering transparent won’t kill anybody, and it lets me spend more time on the other 94% of my visitors.

What about you? Where do you draw the line for IE6 support?