I was concerned by this statement yesterday:

Ingmar Greil - 17 April 2008 02:25 AM

catering to non-standards compliant browsers is entirely optional, depending on a number of factors. It certainly does not constitute a “professional responsibility” as such; especially if the site is usable in principle.

While this is a personal viewpoint (though Ingmar is a technical support member) it’s actually a very worrying one considering IE6 is much more common than IE7 - making it the worlds second most common browser acording to most surveys.

I’ve noticed that this website isn’t designed to be compatable with IE6. As well as a few cosmetic glitches I’ve had problems downloading files, which cut off after a few kb…no such problems in FF though.

As a designer and developer I can’t afford to give 30% of my website audience a second rate experience.

Can someone give me reassurance that the new version of EE will still fully support IE6? I don’t want my clients to see boxes around .png files and have layout issues - while they (hopefully) won’t affect the functionality, they will still look unprofessional.

Thanks.

Can someone give me reassurance that the new version of EE will fully support IE6?

Anyone?

You have to distinguish between backend and frontend - the frontend is completely based on the choice of the designer/site developer - so you’ll have complete control here.
The backend might have a limitation or two with one browser or another in the current version of EE, but I’m not aware of any mayor ones.
I don’t think that will change with EE 2.0. (I consider EllisLab as a smart company, not a stupid one.)

familychoice, as ms mentioned, the front end of any EE driven site is totally up to how your code it.

As far as the back end is concerned, I’m sure we’ll have testers using IE7 and IE6 with it. I personally only have IE7, but my husband’s machine is still running IE6 (he uses Firefox).

Hi familychoice,

As already mentioned its up to the developer on which browsers they wish to target on the front end. In the Control Panel there will be options that make IE6 a workable option since it is, unfortunately, a browser that still can’t be ignored. For example, EE 1.6.x can be used with very old browsers just fine. EE is installed in numerous educational settings, non-profit settings, etc… that are way behind the curve in many regards and we’re certainly not going to leave those people without workable options. But that is not a guarantee that EE 2.0’s CP will be exactly the same in IE6 as it is in modern browsers but it will certainly be usable and workable.

As far as IE6 and ExpressionEngine.com (and the rest of our websites) our goal was to make them usable with IE6, which they are. But they are certainly better in modern browsers. This decision was based on our target audience and our usage statistics for our websites. For us, IE6 is an insignificant portion of our traffic so there was no reason to hold back on more modern techniques for our own websites. We are well aware that we are fortunate in this regard and that most of the web still has to deal with IE6 on a regular basis.

The download issues with IE6 are likely caused by a security setting specific to that browser that is different between IE6 and Firefox.

Thanks for the replies.