I reckon as much as 25% of my users are using ie 6
Well, based on the most recent browser statistics, you have an unusual group of users!
It is very difficult to optimize a theme design for IE6. Are you using a custom theme? If so, look at the header.php file that comes with the default BP theme and make sure that you’ve included the calls to the ie6.css files.
Also, here’s a thread that about IE6 issues that may help out: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2262#post-14161
I said this in another thread about IE support:
Getting themes of any platform (not just WordPress) to work in all versions of IE can be frustrating and tricky at best, impossible at worst. I would focus on optimizing your users’ IE experience on IE8 and IE7. Some designers are not even supporting IE6 anymore. I wouldn’t even worry about IE5.5 Of course, this is only my opinion.
I used a conditional comment to include a couple of extra style rules to enable the friend requests – it was a bit of a kludge but seems to have dome the trick – could be improved considerably, but I decided to upgrade my installation and deal with whatever problems the new theme has with IE6 rather than waste time on fixing it completely. Here is the conditional comment from my header.php template:
<!--[if lte IE 6]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory') ?>/_inc/css/ie6.css" /><![endif]-->
Note that I am using a modified child theme, so all stylesheets are in {theme folder}_inc/css/
And here is the stylesheet itself:
/* holly hack to make disappearing things reappear (PEEK-A-BOO) */
* html .internal-page #content {
height:1%;
}
/* action buttons are weirdly off page (possible double margins somewhere?) */
* html div.action {
right:180px;
width:150px;
}
Although the link to statistics is roughly correct (10% of internet users still use IE6), the rest of the stats for other browsers is a little distorted by the fact that these stats relate to the w3schools site – other figures show a significantly decreased market share for Firefox, which is kind of understandable considering the nature of the w3schools site.
However, I think it is irresponsible to have such a basic feature inaccessible to 10% of your users, let alone the 37% of users of my installation who still use this antiquated piece of **** for reasons I shan’t go into here. I hope the new templates for 1.2 are tested a bit more thoroughly
A lot of frontend developers are now essentially dropping support for IE6 it’s a rapidly dying browser, many of us have suffered for years getting layouts to work in it and worse in IE5. Acceptable results now tend to be the layout functioning in IE6 but not necessarily having all the bells and whistles that Modern Standards browsers will deliver, personally I will no longer devote too much development time to it, whereas in the past it could have easily soaked up to 50% of the project time
Users must be encouraged to upgrade to at least IE7 although that was an utter waste of space and simply a sop to developers and the wider public while they worked on IE8 which actually is half decent and can claim to be almost a ‘Modern’ browser.
MS themselves would rather people upgrade and MS are only supporting IE6 because they are tied in by the license agreements – but probably wish they weren’t.
The accepted practice to deal with IE issues is to use Conditional Comment structures and IE specific stylesheets as has been mentioned earlier, this approach should provide usable layouts in IE<8
I am currently working on an IE6 stylesheet for the new 1.2 theme and have noticed other threads in this forum on the same topic. I think putting notices on your website nagging people to upgrade their browser is counter-productive, in that the only possible reason I can think of for users to still be using this browser is that they have no choice in the matter (this is certainly the case with my user group).
Placing notices like that nagging users is extremely amateurish and shouldn’t be done
