Ditch Internet Explorer 6 and feed the poor!

Are you still using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6? Then hopefully this post can convince you to move to Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, for the sake of the web designers and for the sake of the world.

Microsoft wants to push Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade to their latest browser version even further by donating to “Feeding America” for every Internet Explorer 8 download through the BrowserForTheBetter website!

For every download to Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft will donate 8 meals to Feeding America and if you are upgrading from IE6 to IE8, Microsoft will double the donation.

Internet Explorer 6 is so old now and it has given lots of headaches to web designers & developers because:

IE6 is insecure.
IE6 doesn’t fully support new web features such as RSS, AJAX, etc.
IE6 lacks PNG Transparency support.
IE6 has lots of CSS issues.
IE6 is filled with crashes.

If you have designed a website at least once, you must have felt the headache when every browser seems to render/display your site differently (assuming you weren’t designing a very basic website). It’s even more painful to try to make it IE6 compatible and it hinders you from making your website shine just the way you want it to be.

My church’s site looks so bad at IE6 (because it uses some cool animated effects) that I needed to display a warning if it detects an IE6 user coming to the site :( I’ve also checked that this blog looks a bit messed up (especially the sidebar) when viewed by IE6.

What makes it worse, there seems to be a great number of people using IE6 coming to this blog (and to yours too). Here is a screenshot on this blog’s traffic last month based on the version of Internet Explorer used: