While I would never wish to nixx Nikki Sixx, ie6 is a major pain in the ass for web developers everywhere. While we have all groused about it for years most of us have had to bow to the pressure to create secondary stylesheets and/or use the “underscore hack“, our only release valve being the occasional  <!– snarky comments –> in our code.

The theory goes that alienating the small, yet maddeningly significant 10-15% of people who still use ie6, with broken layouts or admonishments to switch would turn off would-be vistors/customers/donors. And besides, a lot of people who still use ie6 are:

• Your grandma, who doesn’t know
• Slaves to lazy IT departments or hacky web-apps that only work on ie6

And who wants to give either of them a hard time?

Well the answer seems to be YouTube, and more power to them. Recently, YouTube started warning ie6 users that they will be “phasing out” their browser. You see, sites like YouTube want to use the latest and greatest techniques to wow you with their content and ie6 is holding them back.

Now there is a new initiative called IE6 No More, which provides easy to impliment code for a conditional overlay to encourage ie6-using visitors to step into the present.

Here’s the overlay:

Their homepage lists a pretty impressive array of sites that have signed on to use this code. I added it to joryland so that on the off-chance that one of the five or six people that visit my site are using ie6 I can sleep knowing that I’ve done my part.

I still don’t feel that I can add it to my organizations site, for fear of turning off donors. Though if they knew how much time, and thus donation money, I used trying to work around ie6′s deficiencies everytime I make a site, they might think otherwise.

I’m optimistic that the tide is finally turning in the fight to bury ie6, now hopefully we can do something about Outlook  2010.