How much of the theme development time do you spend solving problems in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6 rendering bugs)?

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Etanol's picture
< 5% of total time spent converting theme project to drupal theme
18% (8 votes)
5-10% of total time spent converting theme project to drupal theme
36% (16 votes)
10-20% of total time spent converting theme project to drupal theme
14% (6 votes)
20-30% of total time spent converting theme project to drupal theme
23% (10 votes)
> 30% of total time spent converting theme project to drupal theme
9% (4 votes)
Total votes: 44

Comments

We all know that IE6 is a

Etanol's picture

We all know that IE6 is a pain in the ass, but I would like to know to what extend.
Extra development time equals extra costs - so how much really does IE6 cost our customers?

I think it depends on the

Jacine's picture

I think it depends on the design for the most part. If there are lots of transparent backgrounds, and rounded corners, obviously it takes longer, but even in the worst case, it's never more than 10% and is at about 5% most of the time for me.

Good idea for a poll Etanol! :)

It will take more than 10%

raffi's picture

It will take more than 10% if you ignore IE6 at the beginning of your design project.

If you design 'properly' I

tjholowaychuk's picture

If you design 'properly' I find that IE6 fixes are really rarely needed, other than png support.. which is enough reason for me to ignore IE6 as a whole.


Tj Holowaychuk

Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design
Victoria British Columbia Web Design School

Difficult to estimate

JohnForsythe's picture

It really depends on the theme. I've learned to do frequent checks in IE6, instead of waiting until everything is finished. It's hard to estimate how much time that eats up, but I wish it wasn't an issue.

html style

elv's picture

It depends if you try to write "modern" html. If you want to use the cascade extensively, multiple-class selectors and transparent images, all those very useful things that help you keep a sane and short stylesheet, IE6 really gets in the way.
If you've given up and code like it's still 2001, IE6 won't annoy you that much.
tjholowaychuk is right (if I understand what he means by "properly"): if you keep IE6 constraints in mind, you can avoid lots of problems at the design phase.

I'm comfortable with IE6 quirks and in the end use very fews hacks, but not being able to use multiple-class selectors is still a major pain.

Sometimes I have to convert to html/css designs made by people who obviously don't get how a web page works. This is where IE6 is the most frustrating, where I need lots of not so nice workarounds.

there can only be one answer

Manuel Garcia's picture

First things first, the options available to the poll were a bit misleading, the question asks about ie6, and the answers answer about porting the theme to a drupal theme?

About the ie6 bug squashing parade, there can only b one answer, and that is: TOO MUCH TIME !

However, once you have spent a ton of hours fixing these, next time you will (hopefuly) keep in mind what kind of css and html you should use to avoid most problems with it from the start. However, this means leaving out a lot of nice properties that make life easier for a themer. Oh well.

I hope IE6 dies quickly.

two things

ricardoom's picture

I agree w/ johnforsythe, i generally develop alongside testing frequently and fixing as need be. in addition you would be surprised how ie6 still persists. i work in the nonprofit sector and many of my co-workers still have windows2000 on their machines! and you know what that means... no firefox, maybe ie 7 if im "lucky".

a little foresight helps..

dvessel's picture

It's about 5-10% for me as long as I'm responsible for the design. I have a fairly good idea of the limits so I try not to paint myself into a corner. If the design requires complex markup and styles, I'll always sketch it on paper to make sure it'll work before writing the html/css. I always try and work in modular chunks, looking for reusable pieces then making sure it's solid across all browsers. Once a given element works, I seldom have to revisit it.

Theme development

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