According to our analytics,  there is still a good group of people who view our sites in IE6, about 19% actually. This surprises me, considering that Microsoft has stopped supporting IE6. The browser is known for having a multitude of security issues, and for being slow, riddled with bugs, and generally unable to render CSS. Some users' reluctance to upgrade despite these problems is interesting to me.

Every web developer, like myself, dreams of a day without IE6. To be honest, in my experience, most companies still using IE6 are either stuck with Windows 2000 and cannot upgrade due to software costs, or the IT department is just too busy to perform the update. Then again, such IT departments might say that we developers should be content with IE6 since the other six browsers are not enough, and that IE6 came out in 2001 so maybe they should wait a full decade before the upgrade.

Unfortunately, we are not the only ones who have a problem with IE6, and this is nothing new. I have talked to a good number of individuals who work at the leading web designers firms and their companies have stopped altogether supporting IE6. I still use a png fix sometimes, but if you do not know much about web browsers, updates are very crucial and it will help speed up the way you look at the web. And considering that it is 2008 and IE8 is already out, I don't think an upgrade from IE6 is too much to ask at this point. In addition to these points, consider that IE6, IE7, IE8 really feel and render completely different makes my job as a front end developer that much more difficult.

Solutions

Having seen thousands of websites, I always pondered why new companies are still designing in tables. On their website they state that they know the latest technologies, are efficient with code and compliant...etc. Yet, when you view there site it looks fine, but they give 100+ errors. For some reason, errors seem to show up more in tabled layouts. You will see a site design in all tables if you view their source and there is nothing but <td><tr> on the page. It is okay to use tables for some specific modules or only partially when needed, but to make an entire layout on tables in not intelligent design at all.

Enter CSS
There are many ways to design a website effectively. With CSS, the tableless layout can be very flexible. One line of code can change the page layout completely. And this is a good thing, because once tables are placed, you have to go back into the html just to change it. Having designed all my layouts using external style sheets I can say that it does take more time and you will get a bunch of headaches. Usually the headaches will be from how much we all hate IE and why does everything look different in certain browsers. But the more time spent on a tableless layout, there is less time for modification in the long term.