I can foresee a time when my organisation will use a conditional to point IE6 to a black and white print stylesheet so that at least the content will be accessible, if not pretty. However, that time is not yet upon us and we don't have the luxury of being snooty bitches about it.

My point is that the developers who complain that IE6 is evil and suggest various gruesome ends for Mr Gates because of it, and all the other melodramatic nonsense, all because their layout doesn't work in IE6 - it's completely unwarranted.

If you understand the box model, and understand how IE6 has borked it, it's child's play to build cross-browser compliant layouts - with not a single hack in sight - which can then be used as the basis of progressively enhanced sites.

Instead of using margins on an element to create space between it and its parent, use padding on the parent. Reset your styles. Float everything, contain everything, measure everything to the last pixel. It's hardly rocket science.

IE6 will disappear, no doubt about it; that's evolution. For a nine year-old browser, it's worn reasonably well. I for one have become a better developer - not to mention a better coder - from having to consider all our users, rather than just ditching them and flouncing off with my trendy "standards-compliant" colleagues...

Daily i get thousands of tickets for some browser bugs IE6 or IE7 is the browser that mostly does the trouble.

I have never come across a issue with firefox, once I had an issue, i logged it into firefox portal and they immediately respond.

It is quite evident, microsoft wanted IE to remain in a poor condition to delay all web based services as much as possible.

I hate this idea of performing hacks for IE6 or IE7 because its totally pointless and quite painful.

If u dont think so try supporting these bugs for couple of months.

It got so bad I now use a Mac with Safari, I've given up on Windows' empty promises. No problems yet. It's great the EU has made it law that people are offered a choice of internet explorers! xD

Some folks mention how "back in the day" most browsers required special hacks and "hoops" to jump through.

Now-a-days, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari and to a large degree IE8 all manage to render websites without the need for any special bug work arounds. You can read the JavaScript, HTML4.1 and CSS2 specs and code an entire website without checking it in a browser, and, if you are a moderately experienced coder, your site will "just work" in all these browsers.

How can you say that having IE conditional tags and making changes to your site to SPECIFICALLY suit a certain browser is acceptable? The Web has moved and so has Microsoft -- just check statcounter.com IE6 and 7 marketshare continue to drop as everyone realizes IE8 is a superior product and move to it.

It's just really lame to try and justify the fact that IE6 was always broken when every other modern browser seems to be able to accomplish just fine what IE6 could never do. Have you ever looked at rendering times in IE6? Even if IE6 had a chance of supporting HTML5, its rendering loop is SO, SLOW, you would never be able to run a CANVAS tag animation on it.. and don't even get me started on their laughably bad VML support that is sometimes trotted out as an example of how IE6 was ahead of its time in supporting vector classes.

BLOGGER, PLEASE.

And now when some client calls me cause the website looked disformed on ie6, I simply politely show him/her how shame it is to still be using IE6...

Of course at first they do strange faces/noises, but in the end... some time after they always get thank me!

Oh and as because for me microsoft will be burned with anything that has to do with the internet... when anyone asks me for advise on what browser to use, I always recomend firefox, chrome or opera... or even safari!

Internet Explorer -> Never... I warn them, they will regret later if they ever choose internet explorer (which is most always the truth anyway!).

These workarounds are fine if you're hand coding websites but if you're working on enterprise web applications then you don't have control over third party controls, integrations and ActiveX controls.

IE6 was a terrible, rushed mistake when it was produced and MS should hang their head in shame.