“Sadistic” Web Developers Taunt Internet Explorer 6 Users

There’s a good article on CNN.com today titled “Web citizens trying to kill Internet Explorer 6”, about web developers going on the offense to get users of IE 6 to upgrade their browser. I was hoping to see Expression Web MVP Morten Rand-Hendricksen’s own website Stop Living In The Past mentioned in the article, but the article only mentions https://www.ie6nomore.com/ and https://www.bringdownie6.com/, although there are many more sites out there devoted to squashing IE6. 

Web developers are naturally motivated to kill IE 6 primarily because it would make their jobs much easier.  At the same time, the phrase “job security” always comes to mind when I hear web developers complain about this or that browser quirk they have to troubleshoot in order to perfect their client’s website. If getting a website to look consistently across multiple browsers was as easy as web developers wish, the job market for developers might shrivel up! ;)

Out of curiosity I opened that CNN article in SuperPreview, comparing the page as it appears in FireFox 3 with the page as it appears in IE 6, to see how well the CNN web developers did in accounting for IE 6 readers. Pretty darn good. The content is all readable, that’s most important, but there are big shifts in the layout; guess it’s time to get back to work CNN web developers!

In case you’re wondering, the title of this post is inspired by a quote in that CNN article from a post by Mark Trammel of Digg, which reads “Giving them a message saying, “Hey! Upgrade!” in this case is not only pointless; it’s sadistic.”  True, true …