I'm debugging a site to make it work for IE6 (god, please, let this be the last time). I've gotten pretty far with getting the the layout look right. There's just one more thing bugging me.
Some elements like links, when they get hovered, the body of the site shrinks.
I have built a dropdown with javascript. When it should show, the body of the site shrinks.
There is a slideshow, made with javascript, which changes the z-index of the images, everytime it changes the z-index, the body shrinks.
Now I found some information that IE6 creates this specific shrinking behaviour when using a fixed position element. But this is not the case. Someone here have some ideas for solving this? Thanks!
I use situations like these as an argument to convince the users to finally switch from this monstrosity of a browser.
I hate to ask the question.... but are you using?:
<!--[if IE 6]>
Enter "special" styles for IE 6
<![endif]-->
It will get you out of a jam.
Regarding dropping IE6 support for sites, I have found that complaining to clients about it doesn't work very often. But what does work is showing them in their Google Analytics that only 5% of their site visitors use it, and its ok if it doesn't match exactly, as long as the content is accessible. That niche 5% costs a lot of extra development time and money to cater too. But your screwed if it says 11% :-)
Related
I've built a webpage, everything looks great in IE7 and upwards but in IE6 it's looks bad.
I have a whole div which has a background image that's not even showing up.
Why could this be? Are there common things that tend to not work that could be in my CSS? I don't normally support IE6 so don't usually have to figure these things out, but my client has specified that they want to work in IE6.
Here's the site, yep - quite a nice site in modern browsers! http://www.replyonline.co.uk/ie6sucks/index.html - feel free to look through the code (there's a IE6 specific stylesheet at view-source:http://www.replyonline.co.uk/ie6sucks/css/anythingslider-ie.css where I've solved some of the existing issues.
Thanks
I don't have an IE6 install with me here, but here are a few hints:
It's most likely a positioning ('hasLayout') issue. Try setting zoom: 1 on the missing DIV or its parent(s). The same goes for position: relative or a combination of both.
Also, check some of the content-hiding bugs on PIE: http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html
You can use the Internet Explorer developer toolbar to try some of this out: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=95e06cbe-4940-4218-b75d-b8856fced535. Keep in mind though that some bugs will only appear or get fixed on a full page reload, and not while fiddling with the CSS in the developer toolbar.
I also use XRAY ( http://www.westciv.com/xray ) a lot to see how my elements behave.
For more info on 'having layout', see http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html.
It's tricky to debug since I don't have a working copy of ie6 on my machine, only ietester but there are known issues with ie6 where it doesn't calculate sizes properly in order to display background images properly.
The answer generally is to trigger hasLayout on the element and the easiest way to do this is using position:relative. I'd give that a go before anything else.
I would also recommend having a look at the html5boilerplate stylesheet to see if there is anything there that you can make use of. The reset/reassign css in there is simply brilliant and irons out a lot of css issues.
Best of luck!
1 - Make sure your site validates: W3C Validator Currently yours doesn't ( 146 Errors, 16 warning ).
2 - There's an annoying bug in IE to do with margin/padding, if you have any to the left or right of an element, you may need to do display: inline or inline-block;
I've found little things like this can help.
Looking at the W3C results, it looks like you may have too many closing div tags
I created a simple page with a series of divs. In all of the modern browsers, it appears fine, but in Internet Explorer 6, it falls apart. I have no idea what is causing it to happen.
You can view the page here: IE 6 Test Page
If you have IE6 installed, I included the Firebug Lite JS file on the page, so just click the firebug icon in the bottom right corner to inspect an element.
Here's a screenshot using Browserlab to view the page in Firefox and IE6: Comparison Screenshot
The 3rd div named 'content'(With the Manager Email field) moves everything to the right forcing the next div to the next line. Also, none of the row div's reach all the way across as they should(see Comparison Screenshot)
I did some research and have found that there is some problems in IE6 using floats which I use here, but I'm not sure how to fix it.
Why does my page not display correctly in Internet Explorer 6? And better yet, how can I fix it? :)
It looks like the third div isn't clearing the float properly. Perhaps give each of the row divs the style clear: both
Do you really need to support IE6? Even Microsoft is fighting it nowadays and the market share is starting to be irrelevant except for China.
There's a difference between "not working in IE6" and "not looking perfect in IE6".
As has already been said, IE6's market share is low and continuing to fall -- it's below 2% in most of the developed world (see http://gs.statcounter.com/ for country-by-country stats).
Given those stats, I would say that if the page is usable in IE6 then your work is done. IE6 users are by now used to web pages looking bad. Many popular sites don't work at all in their browser, so one with a few layout glitches won't phase them at all. They'll still use the site.
If it is actually broken to the point of not being usable then it's a different story; in that case, you'd need to consider how important those few IE6 users are to you vs the time it'll take to do the work, and fix it accordingly, but that doesn't seen to be case here: the page seems to work. It looks a bit naff, but it works.
Ok, I've been dealing with IE bugs for a long time now, but this one is beyond me. IE 7 and even 8 does it for sure, I've not seen it on FF or Chrome.
So here's a live URL which produces it: http://mog.com/music/America/Holiday
Reproducing isn't easy, it can take a few times to make it happen. Watch your scrollbar to see it change size so you know the page length was suddenly dropped quite a bit.
Here's how you do it:
Hover over any sub-nav link (Main, Albums, Songs, Photos, News, etc.)
Try them until you see the scrollbar change size. Once it does, scroll all the way down and notice the footer has jumped up on top of much of the page content.
Be careful scrolling down that you don't roll over a few other page elements that will suddenly fix this. So far I can see that any of the Play buttons will somehow fix this.
It's just beyond weird. How could a rollover state cause this kind of behavior?
I've tried:
Removing the a:hover style - THIS FIXES IT... WTF? Of course we ideally would keep some hover state, so hoping to avoid this fix.
Reproducing the hover functionality using jQuery hover(). - THIS DOESN'T FIX IT.
I figure the clues are in the elements that somehow magically fix it...and possibly in where the page jumps to, what elements suddenly get obscured by the footer.
Lastly, I didn't produce this site from scratch and it uses a lot of absolute and relative positioning for certain things and I know that is partly what causes these weird bugs. I rarely, rarely use esp absolute positioning to avoid these kinds of bugs, but it's a bit too late now.
Thanks for anyone willing to check it out!!
Well, I figured it out. It was an odd case of the "Guillotine" bug. One I luckily haven't come across before. Turns out the "special" CSS rules on those nav links' hover state (particularly it seemed the border and bg image) were enough to trip this bug. One way around was to drop those styles, but not ideal. The real fix, however, was an unsemantic clearing div placed in just the right spot. More info found here:
http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/guillotine.html
Hi just a short note: When did you validate your html the last time?
As you probably know, but might have forgotten, fixing your html can sometimes solve a lot of problems. There are 72 errors seen by http://validator.w3.org
I am pulling my hair trying to find a fix for this problem. If you go to this site you will see that (under IE) the slider and the menu on the top is broken. Works fine under all modern browsers.
Any idea how to fix this? Thanks.
Edit: Want to add that the original site design works fine under IE. I did a massive amount of editing under the hood and somewhere along the line this one was broken that I can't seem to find a fix for. Since I did a lot of customization, I think it seems unfair to ask the original author for a fix (and he is not very responsive either).
The document invalid. In particular, there is a <style> element before the Doctype. This triggers Quirks mode and causes browsers to become very inconsistent (e.g. IE emulates a log of bugs from IE 5.5).
Always work in standards mode and perform basic automated QA.
I can't check it for you, since I've not got access to IE right now, but I've often found that adding position:relative to misbehaving elements is something of an IE magic bullet.
No fix but a lead: the issue with the menu bar is one of IE's mysterious float positioning bugs, as can be demonstrated by putting <div style="clear: both">xxx</div> after the navbar ul. (Note that it won't work if the div has no content!)
stuff about box model deleted: as David Dorward mentions this is caused by quirks mode, and moving the style down past the doctype causes the slider to behave sensibly.
My webpage is suffering from two IE6 rendering bugs. Each of them have workarounds, but unfortunately said workarounds are incompatible with each other.
Here's a minimized test case. The behavior in Firefox/Safari is the desired/correct one. IE7 is unknown, since I don't have access to it right now.
First bug: #content has overflow: auto and contains a relatively-positioned div. IE6 incorrectly gives the relatively-positioned div a 'fixed' appearance. Workaround: Set position: relative on #content.
Second bug: The page sometimes shows a modal popup. The z-index on the popup and background are set really high to stop anything behind them from being interacted with. This works fine until I set position:relative on #content, which makes IE6 treat the z-index property completely wrong.
How can I make these bugs play nicely with each other? (Note: Remotely formatting the hard drives of users still running IE6 is not an option, much to my dismay.)
Edit: Here's a second test case that shows what happens when I apply position: relative to content. The first bug ('fixed' appearance of #content-header) is solved, but it causes the z-index bug to kick in and mess up the modal background.
There are a myriad of implementation as to how to avoid the massive issues with ie6 (and below) conformity. The only one that has actually worked for me (to a great extent even) is Dean Edward's solution.
Try to insert the following line in your main header:
<!--[if lt IE 8]><script src="http://ie7-js.googlecode.com/svn/version/2.0(beta)/IE7.js" type="text/javascript"></script><![endif]-->
-- and see how it goes from there (and what you still need to handle, since it probably won't fix everything).
The script size is a mere 30kb, and will only be loaded in ie6 and ie7.
The google code url is (obviously) http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
Implement something like we've done at Ra-Ajax.org (hint, visit the site with IE ;)
Seriously, even prototype.js and 37signals have STOPPED supporting IE6 now, I think it's time to move on...
I don't think using a library is too bad of a penalty to minimize my time working around ridiculous IE bugs.
We ended up using the bgiframe jquery plugin (http://plugins.jquery.com/project/bgiframe). It implements the iframe "shield" technique in a library. I figure that making IE6 users have to have a bit more of a library download penalty (which isn't really all that much) so that I don't have to go crazy about IE6 bleedthru is worth it.
P.S. I think the web developers of the world should start a class action lawsuit to force Microsoft ether to offer the equivilant of firebug for IE6 and IE7, make sure all IE6 and IE7 instances are upgraded to standards, or remove all versions of IE6 and IE7 from all computers on the Internet, or bail-out all web developers with a payment of $1M each for their pain and suffering!
While it may be the wrong solution, and probably way overkill, jQuery can do modal popups similar to this and works on IE6. I'll probably get downvoted for such a simple answer, but it is still worth considering, or at least looking at, other solutions before reinventing the wheel.