You may look at the above screenshot and see a pretty messed up looking site. You might think “wow, that sure isn’t up to the standard of the NorthTemple crew.” But beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
The screenshot is beautiful because it is the start of a new era for us. Look closely at which browser that is. That message is for users of IE6.
For the past year or so we have had the luxury of dropping IE6 for internal projects as our oganization finally made IE7 available. Yes, until December 2008 we were in one of those organizations that everybody hates, that perpetuated the evil that is IE6. We had many off the shelf systems that wouldn’t work with the newer browsers and so were kind of stuck.
But since that glorious day, you can well imagine how much pain, suffering, blood, sweat and tears not having to worry about IE6 has saved us (not to mention tithing dollars).
As of the soft launch of the Youth website pictured above, we are starting to phase out support for IE6 on our public sites as well. That beautiful screenshot above shows the message and site that IE6 users will see.
Alignment is messed up, transparent png files are not transparent, and several other things are broken. But truth be told, I can still navigate around the site and I can still read the content.
I wasn’t involved on this project or the decisions on how it was handled. But I like how they didn’t totally kill the site for IE6. Users get a much less pleasant experience, but they can still get to the content if they choose.
I’m glad that we are starting down the path to help make the internet a better place. I like that Chrome and Firefox are listed above IE7 as replacement browsers. I love that we are joining others in dropping support for IE6.