The Turning Gate / Browsers on my mind

Browsers on my mind

Being that IE6 is for dinosaurs, Koreans and losers

With the release of Firefox 3 last week, I've been reminded of something I've been meaning to write on since redesigning this site.

Web savvy visitors may not have noticed, but The Turning Gate looks like poo in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). This was an intentional and, I dare say, responsible design decision.

As viewed in IE6, page elements are positioned as they should be, but PNG transparency is unsupported and there may or may not be other issues elsewhere on the site. The place is fully functional; just ugly.

You might be wondering why I would intentionally make ugly my website to a particular audience, point it out to you and then call it responsible website. You might be thinking I'm a lunatic. You might be shaking your head in disapproval, or, if you've got a hate on for IE like I do, you might even be clapping your hands.

In explanation, I would first tell you that I would never purposefully cripple a website being designed for a client. Furthermore, I work hard to ensure as uniform an appearance as possible, regardless of browser, in my Lightroom web gallery templates. For my personal website, however, I believe I should be allowed my eccentricities.

In keeping with this believe, those visitors gracing The Turning Gate by way of Internet Explorer are welcomed with bonus site content (pictured)! Hurray! Oh, those lucky people!

According to my Mint today, 58% of my visitors are Firefox users, while 19% visit with Internet Explorer 7 and 5% persist in the tomfoolery that is Internet Explorer 6. Presently, with 18,908 unique visitors having come to the site since mid-May (when I began tracking with Mint), roughly 945 are still using IE6 (most of South Korea, I'm looking at you). Nearly 3,600 visitors are using IE7, and fewer than one percent are complete weirdos, still using IE5.

That's a lot of people, and now we come to the point: If we're ever going to save these poor souls, we've got to do something!

Here on The Turning Gate, I've refused to cater to Internet Explorer. I've sworn off workarounds and CSS hacks, Javascript fixes for IE's flaws and PNG display tricks, and I'm actively warning IE users to cry off the damn software -- without interfering with other visitors, using other browsers -- using conditional statements. Idea being, if the web looks crappy enough in the old browser, users might finally see fit to answer the call of greater things.

I'm on a crusade, and I firmly believe others should join my ranks by implementing similar tactics on their own sites. Internet Explorer 6 was replaced in 2006; users have had plenty of time by now to upgrade to the most recent version (which is still a security liability) or to choose a much better browser. Internet Explorer continues to be the most web standards deficient, infrequently updated and insecure browser in common use. People need to be warned, and encouraged to protect themselves. Certainly, The Turning Gate is not the only place you'll hear this said. But I see few web designers willing to put their websites where their mouths/fingers are.

You might think I'm making a mountain of a mole hill, but I've been living in South Korea, where IE6 remains the most prominent browser going, and where a ridiculous number of high-profile websites are designed only to function in IE6, going so far as to recommend that users "upgrade" to that (abysmal) browser. I've got to boot Windows in a virtual machine and run IE6 just to check show times at the local movie theater.

Two years is an overlong transition period, and it's time to stop coddling late adopters (Korea, I'm looking at you again; but Koreans aren't the only ones). If web designers continue to support bad browsers, users will never see reason to stop using them. It's time to get these people out of Plato's cave; make the shadows so little appealing, they finally come out to see the light.