I write this post in the hopes that one day IT departments across the planet will wake up and realize the cost effectiveness of upgrading IE 6 to IE 8.  As a web developer I spend about one third to one half of my time when a bug arises (ussually for IE 6 alone) solving the problems of Interent Explorer.  This week alone I needed to code a few simple JavaScript scripts for a new project and each piece of functionality took only a few hours to get the basics in place, but then required about twice as much time getting it to work in IE 6.  Cross Browser functionality is a known task in my line of work, but it can be a nightmare when it comes to IE 6 and it’s outdated functionality.

Internet Explorer 6 came out in 2001 (eight years ago) and IE 7 came out in 2006.  According to Upsdell IE 6 accounts for ~26% of browser usage, this is still unfortunately a large enough user base to warrant developing web sites that are compatible.  MicroSoft still manages to push out security fixes every now and then, and that might be the real culprit of the situation.  If MS simply stated that they would no longer support IE 6 and that the only way to get new security features is to upgrade to IE 7 at least then I think companies would make the switch.  I think that the costs associated with a rollout upgrade are probably cost effective if you think about the time spent dealing with security risks to individual PCs that are vulnerable with IE 6, and you think about the time wasted on simple productivity of users that do not have a browser that was even built when Web 2.0 became a standard.

IE 8 is desgined to be a relatively decent competitor to the existing landscape that now includes Chrome and Safari 4 for the PC. The new version has many features such as their Accelorators and InPrivate browsing that can be very useful, along with tabbed browsing (a novelty of an idea that IE 6 will never support) that enhance the use of the browser as a tool.

For a few years now I’ve relied on zoom: 100% as my saving grace for finding lost elements in Internet Explorer.  You see sometimes when you try to position an element on the screen, place a transparent <div> over a Flash object, or do something slighly out of the ordinary, IE will freak out and not display the object, hide it, or drop it to the bottom of z-index order.

Fortunately there’s a solution in the form of a hack called Zoom.  Zoom is a CSS style that allows IE to zoom in on an element.  Typically you don’t need to do this, and oddly enough when you do apply zoom even at the non-zoomed level of 100% it forces Internet Explorer to re-evaluate it’s CSS styling.  So now you can make sure that these lost elements come back to where they are supposed to be.

So when in doubt, use zoom.

<!--[if IE]>
<style type="text/css">
	#element{
		zoom: 100%;
	}
</style>
<![endif]-->