If you’ve been designing web sites for any length of time you will have come across some pain dealing with IE6. It single-handedly causes more nightmares than all the other browsers put together. Today I’d like to talk about solutions which may fix many IE6 problems and all it takes is a minute.
I have spent my career fixing the bugs by hand. I have always designed in FireFox and then fixed for IE. Some of the bugs are monsters but there are some simple solutions you can use which will sort out many of the issues.
IE7.JS, IE8.js and IE9.js
http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
If you’re not aware Google have a code base (A repository) for files which will aid web developers and designers. One of these pieces of code is the IE7.js, IE8.js and more recently IE9.js Google sums up this code nicely:
“IE7.js is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.”
IE9.js not only helps IE6 but it also helps IE7 and IE8 with some of their problems. There has been some limited CSS3 support added for these two as well as some of the general bugs.
The most useful thing for me is transparent png support combined with fixing some of the inconsistencies of IE.
I have used the IE9.js on the new revamp of my freelance web designer site to really push the code. I have tons of transparent PNG’s, lots of negative margins and other nasties to really push the script and to my surprise IE6 handled everything I threw at it. This was the first time I have designed a final version to break IE6 but it was an excellent test with equally excellent results.
One final note on this:
If you link to it directly through Google there is a very good chance that the user will already have this cached from their visits to other sites using it. That means you will have a small reduction in load time.
Get IE6 to accept transparent PNG’s
http://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/
I have been using this for a very long time and it was the best method I found for getting IE6 to play ball with transparent images. This solution is not perfect because the PNG’s will have a temporary grey background while the script kicks in but at least we are not limited to JPG and GIF for the answers.
See it in action at http://www.wizz-kidz.com which uses a LOT of PNG’s
Related blog posts:
> All the IE6 bugs plus fixes in one handy location
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