Indie-Resource.com

I have noticed that when I overlay images, there is a problem in IE 6 where a white background shows up when it should be transparent. I saved the background of the png image as alpha, but for IE 6 it still shows as a white background. The overlay works fine in IE 7 and Firefox, but I was wondering if anyone knew a way to make the background of an image transparent for IE 6?

Here is a downloadable script and a short tutorial for a fix. It seems that otherwise this is a pretty hard issue to fix.

However, I have stopped developing with IE6 in mind. The "big dogs", Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, Ebay and Facebook have all dropped support for it over a year ago, which means that anyone still using IE6 is going to be getting a pretty jacked version of the popular internet and it should be pretty apparent they need to upgrade. So why should we break our backs trying to support a nearly 10-year old browser?

Thanks for the information Jackolantern.

I wasn't sure how many people were still using IE 6 and whether I needed to account for that. After reading your post and seeing that not many people are still using IE 6 and many companies are not worried about dealing with issues with IE 6, it makes me less worried about making things look good in IE 6.

yep jack is right. I stopped worrying about it a while ago. But I am not a "big dog"

Well, there is always a trade-off. You can deal with the headaches of staying compatible with IE6 to ensure you aren't turning away anyone. But, let's think about this for a moment. The newest Windows OS that is not capable of upgrading to IE7, to my knowledge, is Windows 98 (if I remember right, I had IE 7 on a Windows 2000 machine at my last job). That is a mighty old OS! Then you have to take your potential audience into account. You will likely be targeting gamers or at least technology-minded people with your website, who are probably not working on a Win98 PC. Anyone on a newer version of Windows will be able to upgrade if asked, but you are unlikely to even have an IE6 visitor considering the kind of content you are likely to be offering. Anyone even remotely interested in PC gaming will not still be using Windows 98 lol. It is hard to even find a penny-pinching company that is still using Windows 98 machines these days!

The big web sites that have stopped supporting IE6 were mostly for technological reasons. Some of the features, namely AJAX features, on Facebook and Google simply cannot be coaxed into working on IE6, for example. Anyone still using IE6 should know at this point that they are severely restricted on the web due to these sites no longer supporting their browser.

I personally believe for the types of sites this community will be making, it just isn't worth holding yourself back to support IE6. You may have to turn away 2 or 3 people through the life of your site, but that opens up a world of new design and development possibilities for the hundreds or thousands who can access it. It may be a very different decision if you were making a site for a government agency who's visitors include a complete slice of the population, and who's access is given much more weight than features or style.

The fact is IE6 still has more than 5% of the browser industry.. Sorry if that's the wrong term.. I'm rather drunk..

But anyway.. First I was all up for not making my websites compatible with IE6 as I want people to upgrade.. but 5% is quite a lot of people. It's more than Opera and Safari put together.

Windows XP came with IE6 as it's main browser, and it's still the most used OS.

<3 Opera.

IE6 still has a small chunk, but who is that chunk? We can probably make a few assumptions about those who are still using IE6 (I know what they say about assumptions, but lets not worry about that lol).

1. They are probably not technology-minded people.
2. They are probably not game players.
3. Computers and computing are likely a very low priority to them, seeing as they not willing to pay to upgrade their system for more than a decade.
4. They probably don't stray far from the high-profile sites such as Yahoo!, Ebay, and Amazon, even though they are getting broken versions of those sites.
5. Those who don't fit into the above are likely business computer users that have no choice over their browser. In that case, these users are of somewhat lower value to entertainment/game-based website owners since you can still potentially reach these users on their home PC or laptop, and they are also less likely to devote time to playing a PBBG on their lower-powered work PC.

Windows XP is the only semi-modern browser that had IE6 on it, and it was a Windows Critical Update to update it years ago to IE7. So the only people left on IE6 are either Windows 98 or earlier users (meaning they qualify for 1 - 4 above), or they are using locked work computers (meaning they quality for 5 above).

I just personally think it is too much trouble and too limiting to keep developing with IE6 in mind, and the majority of Fortune 500 web-based companies think so too. Newer features and HTML5's impending acceptance are just too tantalizing to worry about these dinosaurs. When you only look at gamers and people who may play a PBBG or go to a game-related site, that IE6 number probably drops to lower than 2 or 3%, and I would gladly lose that number to allow better features.

@Halls:

Do you have a list of browser accesses to this site? Can you see how many IE6 accesses you get? I would be very interested to know

Doubt many potential gamers use IE6. Like I have said many many times those stats are skewed. You are counting work machines that dont always upgrade. We just upgraded our 40,000 PCs to IE7 about 2 months ago.

Indie Resource, 1 years data

7. Successful server requests 9,179,835 Requests
8. Successful requests in last 7 days 73,103 Requests
9. Successful requests for pages 194,319 Requests for pages
10. Successful requests for pages in last 7 days 1,846 Requests for pages
11. Failed requests 615,297 Requests
12. Failed requests in last 7 days 11,466 Requests
13. Distinct files requested 668,913 Files
14. Distinct files requested in last 7 days 9,500 Files
15. Distinct hosts served 63,088 Hosts
16. Distinct hosts served in last 7 days 1,148 Hosts
17. Unwanted lines in the logfile 344 Lines
18. Total data transferred 97.826 GB
19. Total data transferred in last 7 days 947.849 MB

Operating System Number of requests Number of page requests

1. Windows 7,897,983 143,653
Windows XP 3,503,802 67,583
Unknown Windows 4,079,574 66,579
Windows 2000 120,361 5,273
Windows NT 45,877 1,605
Windows Server 2003 76,670 1,368
Windows ME 16,592 400
Windows 95 24,972 358
Windows 98 18,840 320
Windows CE 6,827 96
Windows 3.1 4,468 71
2. Unix 637,959 24,125
Linux 636,385 24,008
BSD 748 81
SunOS 790 34
IRIX 36 2
3. OS unknown 298,909 16,709
4. Known robots 100,123 5,108
5. Macintosh 237,215 4,058
6. Symbian OS 2,663 28
7. Amiga 559 8
8. RISC OS 90 2
9. Palm OS 105 2
10. OS/2 244 1
11. BeOS 197 1
12. OpenVMS 50 0
13. WebTV 47 0

Browser Type Number of requests

1. Firefox 4,417,235
2. MSIE 3,058,221
3. Safari 793,219
4. Opera 378,565
5. Netscape (compatible) 243,185
6. Mozilla 109,284
7. Netscape 38,452
8. Wget 33,166
9. omgilibot 24,785
10. msnbot 12,771
11. DailyPerfect 9,040
12. Konqueror 6,833
13. msnbot-media 4,833
14. Yandex 4,156
15. Feed2Imap v0.9.3 http: 3,361
16. Feedfetcher-Google; (+http: 2,989
17. Linguee Bot (http: 2,283
18. Googlebot-Image 2,229
19. Apple-PubSub 2,159
20. Baiduspider+(+http: 1,649
[not listed: 321] 27,729

Even with the percentage, the only way you can make those people adapt is if you take the apple route. Tell people to use the browsers that you specify, the people interested enough will upgrade accordingly, the other people probably wouldn't have been into it that much anyway.