Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger
So, what did web designers do when IE6 first came out? Was it non-compliant even then?
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Yes.
When IE6 came out around 2001 with the release of XP, Netscape was pretty much dead. This allowed IE6 to have a peak market share of around 95% in the early 2000s, which kept climbing until around late 2004/early 2005. During that time, the industry guidelines for how a web browser should behave had about as much weight at Microsoft as a UN resolution has on North Korea.
Then came Firefox, which was the first widely successful non-IE browser that had the features to be successful, while still sticking closely to the industry standards.
The whole attitude that people in corporate environments can't quickly change browser versions is true, but nowadays with the newer versions of IE moving towards standards, it is becoming harder and harder to actually make websites work in IE6. There are a lot of "hacks" that have to be done to get IE6 to play nice, and all of them lead to horrendous code. And every time a newer version of IE is released, it becomes harder to get IE6 to work correctly, and really takes a disproportionate amount of man-hours in regards to the IE6 market share.
Yet the people who are "stuck" with IE6 is still high enough that it can't be ignored, although once it drops below 10% for all IE visitors, that's when you'll pretty much see support for it drop like a stone.