IE6 is dead! … No really, I mean it this time!

How many times have we heard that IE6 is dead or even it’s funeral announced? The fact of the matter is that IE6 is not dead until your clients say so, or you just stop taking on clients who demand support for it. As with so many web projects, it’s often not your choice anyway, but we can still try and nudge them along with a decision to axe IE6. Charging more money, removing fantastic features from your mockups, or showing clients web stats are some methods that can be used to steer people away from this ancient browser. Google has also added one more tool to our arsenal and I recently got to use it on a project that was self destructing in IE6.

It’s called the IE upgrade warning and it’s pretty slick and super easy to set up. All you need to do is download the zip file from Google’s IE upgrade warning page. Extract and upload the included goodies to your server and add this snippet into the page.

<!--[if lte IE 6]><script src="js/ie6/warning.js"></script><script>window.onload=function(){e("js/ie6/")}</script><![endif]-->

You will also need to upgrade the paths to point to your JavaScript directory. Once you do so, you should get a pretty little box like the one shown below when ancient IE browsers arrive at your site.

I know a lot of us could probably think of more colourful things to say in this message, but it’s probably just best to leave it alone. You can also get loads of translation files too! So the next time you think about dumbing down the user experience or spending 25% more time trying to make a site work in IE6, maybe this handy little script is the answer.