Cross-Browser Compatibility or Testing in IE6

Tuesday, December 4. 2007

I've been trying to test my latest Blogger templates in IE6, you know just because, not for any reason other than I thought it might be interesting to see if they still work. Well the good news is they do, a couple of small things might need to be fixed or not depending on how much of a problem they are.

The biggest problem though is actually trying to use IE6. I have automatic updates on my Windows XP virtual machine configured to automatically keep me updated and therefore protected from the scourge of the modern world, Microsoft bugs!

Now anyone who is running a genuine version of Windows XP and who is connected to the Internet will tell you that IE7 has been added to the list of essential updates, yay, but if you want to test sites in IE6, then uninstalling IE7 can be a problem. Anyway I successfully reverted to IE6 but now have to disable automatic updates. Painful.
What really peeved me off the most though, was that by some stroke of bad luck, uninstalling IE7 also somehow managed to overwrite some of my desktop settings so that font smoothing got turned off. I have no idea why changing versions of IE should do this but it stinks, and frankly is a bit of a worry.

Anyway, if Windows users complain about their fonts looking pixellated get them to open the Display Properties dialog and under Appearance click the 'Effects' button, then select 'Clear Type'. Arial may be one of the most popular fonts ever created, but without this setting it's just plain ugly.

According to my stats only 30% of my readers use IE, but i have no idea how many of you are still using IE6, or how many are using IE7, it would be great to find out. I know that one of my pages doesn't work very well in IE6, well at least I do now, so I'll be fixing this today, but for those of you who are still running IE6, may I please ask you to update to IE7. It's easy to do, just enable automatic updates. IE6 is a very old browser and it isn't as safe as running IE7, there are too many bugs and your computer could easily be hijacked by viruses or trojans.
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