When the desired death of a browser makes it into a full-page editorial of IEEE Spectrum – you know that the issue is finally starting to gain some traction. The tech blogosphere communities have been making plenty of noise about this for a while now. And I’d love someone to do an ‘economic’ impact analysis for IE6 – both in terms of development and security related incidents.

I think the Spectrum article (and the referring blog post from Digg) does a good job of describing the issues – corporate restrictions being high on the list of reasons that prevent a user from upgrading. That said I’d rank Microsoft’s failed Vista strategy which resulted in downgrade options to Windows XP being offered by manufacturers, along with the number of illegal and non-updating XP installations out there as just as large a contribution.

Despite my earlier and naïve attempt to ban IE6 from my site I’ve now successfully bared the browser using IE conditional comments – which is the only reliable way you can detect this version of IE (you can’t sniff for it reliably). I then display the following :-)

UPDATE 12/07/2009 - As Shirley Boyle sang - "I dreamed a dream". The exercise below was great for learning how to use the IIS7 Url Rewrite Module - but there is a long list of user agents that contain the string "compatible; MSIE 6.0;" including the MSN spider and some transparent proxies. Internet Explorer 6 is the browser that refuses to die. :-(

ORIGINAL POST - This one took a little while to figure out along with a careful read of the reference docs for the IIS7 Url Rewrite Module. I was banging my head against the wall for a few minutes with {USER_AGENT} before reading the fine print… the HTTP prefix bit in particular.

All dash (“-”) symbols in the HTTP header name are converted to underscore symbols (“_”).
All letters in the HTTP header name are converted to capital case.
“HTTP_” prefix is added to the header name.
For example, in order to access the HTTP header “user-agent” from a rewrite rule, you can use the {HTTP_USER_AGENT} server variable.

And here’s the result…

<rule name="BlockIE6" stopProcessing="true">
  <match url=".*" />
  <conditions>
    <add input="{HTTP_USER_AGENT}" pattern="MSIE 6" />
    <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
    <add input="{URL}" negate="true" pattern="ie6" />
  </conditions>
  <action type="Redirect" url="ie6" redirectType="Permanent" />
</rule>

It’s really really important that you do two things: 1) Prevent the redirect from redirecting static content – like script files and style sheets, ala the {REQUEST_FILENAME} negative condition, and 2) You also check the Url to see if it’s the redirected Url – i.e. they’ve already been redirected – otherwise you’ll get an endless redirect loop. In this case I’m sending them to the url “ie6” which is an action on a route in ASP.Net MVC – displaying a download page with some ‘alternatives’ :-)

Well partly as an act of procrastination (the books and reading are piling up), and partly in recognition of the fact that the previous design sucked big time... I've redesigned the blogs and photo gallery. It took three days in total - and I think the results are ok. At least I think it sucks less than the previous design.

Thanks to firebug and a list of fairly well known IE7 issues - it went pretty well this time. No major CSS gottchas... a pretty good two column liquid layout and drop shadow as well as less cruft. I've dropped IE6 support - too much pain to go there and well.. it's my site... :-)

I got all nostalgic and Canadian this evening - after I took my first good look at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's web site. A fantastic site - I was totally blown away. Easily as good as the BBC site if not better and a top level example of brilliant design, XHTML, CSS and JavaScript (including jQuery).

I have a lot of respect for experienced CSS/XHTML designers having lived through two medium size projects that both had accessibility and XHTML Strict requirements - it was tough going. We survived the Peekaboo Bug, the Guillotine Bug, and the Duplicate Characters Bug to name a few.

I recently updated the design of my blog and my photo gallery component. Trying to keep the site IE6 compatible brought back painful memories. Thanks to this kind blogger at 456 Berea St - I managed to squash the last CSS bug in the layout - a problem I was having with space appearing between <li> items in a list that contains block level elements. I was kind of surprised to see this in IE7. The block element in this case was an <a> tag - and needed to have a width or height set in order to close up the gap between the containing <li>s; a very common layout for creating hover effects on menu items in <ul> lists. Sigh.

Lone blogger 1 - IE6/IE7 0