OK, this one’s a bit more technical than usual!
On a previous post, I discussed how you could use PHP’s get_browser() function to detect your users’ browser information. You may need to do this for a number of reasons: fixing small CSS details (for instance, positioning <button> elements next to input fields and getting them to display correctly) and preventing your users from seeing stuff reserved for the googlebot† are some examples that come to mind. Read on!
It’s all over the news. YouTube is dropping support for IE6. One of the first top-tier websites to do it, I reckon, which makes you wonder why it hadn’t happened before. Us working online have been ranting about it for quite a while —just as we did with IE5.5 and Netscape 4.7— as making stuff work on it costs us dearly in terms of time and resources and despite what I may have said before, it’s not a lot of fun.
This just raises a big question. Now that large-scale, popular websites are starting to drop support for the old fella, should everyone else follow the lead? I guess it depends on who and where your target audience is. A quick look at our stats tells us that IE6 users account for less than 2% of our traffic. But we’re a design studio and I’m sure that most of our readers are tech-savvy enough to know better. However, I have another site which I developed as a hobby, it’s a Spanish-language dating website, where IE6 users surpass 60% of the total traffic! I simply cannot drop support for it. Read on!