need help with IE 6

Question

so i've been working on a website now for like a couple months and i test it on chrome mainly. but before i release anything big i always check it on firefox 3.something and IE7. Now i've received some complaints that that it doesn't look very good in IE6 and when i do check it... well ya it doesn't look like its supposed to. Is there any quick fix that i can add to my HTML to make it look the same in IE6 as it does every where else?

Answer 1

There is no quick trick to getting everything to work. Pretty much have to examine each element that looks different. That said, you might try looking at a CSS reset file. Yahoo has one. And if you search google I'm sure you can find others.

Answer 2

Uhm... if there is a simple solution I really want to know it. :) But you can anyway use this good Microsoft tool to cross-test your pages. It can be usefull for compare the final render of a website.

Answer 3

A really good start is http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/ Just place it in conditional comment tags in the head of your document and it will make ie6 'standards-compliant'. After that make sure you have seperate css documents for each version of IE, and make sure all of your code is valid with w3's validator. Also declaring a doctype can fix many issues, but it MUST be on the very first line that the browser sees.

Edit: also, for png transparency, I've found that this http://www.twinhelix.com/test/ (IE PNGFIX 2.0 Alpha) works best.

Answer 4

Read this: Internet Exporer box model bug. Also try using YUI reset or Eric Meyer's resetReloaded to set a baseline for all your styles.

And stop developing in Chrome! Try Firefox with Firebug.

Answer 5

CSS resets will probably do nothing if it looks fine in IE7. Things like double margins when floating and overflow:auto bugs are things that need to be manually added for each occurance. I'd suggest adding the following line to your head tag:

<!--[if lt IE 7]><style type="text/css">@import "/stylesheets/ie6.css";</style><![endif]-->

and then writing an ie6.css file to fix all the bugs (yes, one at a time)

Probably not what you wanted to hear, but it is why everyone hates IE6 so much

Answer 6

At the risk of downvotes: have you tried adding IE6 to your test matrix? If you have a significant number of users complaining that it looks bad on IE6, you clearly have a significant number of users using IE6 to use it, so it seems like it would be worth your while to just add it to the set of browsers you check before release. Just sayin'.

Answer 7

How badly does your website 'break' in IE6? If it's minor, then I wouldn't worry about it.

How critical is it that it works in IE6? It's share of the market is slowly but surely declining (Looking at my own logs from a Government website also shows that IE6 is definitely going away). Can you display a message on your website letting users know if they use IE6 and advising that they upgrade?

There are many reasons to upgrade, and educating your users as to why they should upgrade might also be worthwhile?