IE6
Posted on April 12, 2008 - 8:45am
IE6
Hello, I hope someone can help me... I am a designer more than I am a programmer so I don't know how to do something in JavaScript. I just added Sprouts to a client's website and * then* I learned that they don't work in IE6. OUCH! Seeing as how 1/2 of his visitors use IE6, this is a problem. Can anyone tell me if I can have JavaScript detect if the viewer is using IE6 as their browser - and then can I redirect IE 6 users to another page? If so, how? Please explain to me *very* carefully. I'm fairly intelligent but since I don't use JavaScript daily, I don't know all of the lingo. I tried to search for this on the web but was finding so many answers that were then saying that their method no longer worked for various reasons. Thanks soooo much.
I found the answer to my question... in PHP rather than JavaScript.
<?php
$ua = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
if (strpos($ua,'MSIE') != false && strpos($ua,'Opera') === false)
{
if (strpos($ua,'Windows NT 5.2') != false)
{ if(strpos($ua,'.NET CLR') === false) return; }
if (substr($ua,strpos($ua,'MSIE')+5,1) < 7)
{
header('Location: http://www.yoursitename.com');
}
}
?>
Hmm IE6 brought another raft of incompatibilities and rendering faults along with it not to mention new security holes and problems. It is also extremely slow, maybe ne day M$ will crack this but I somehow doubt it.
Another issue worth considering is that in many corporate settings the IT despartments will lock down the PC's and run with what ever comes in the particular version of windows they are happiest with. For the 3500 PCs in my corporate world thats XP SP2, IE5 and flash player 6. IT departments are often a little staid and very conservative, but for example if we go to IE6 our web image viewing platform is no longer certified as for medical use. Unfortunately the same holds for a lot of updates to things like JVMs and DLL's, a small change could break something important and end up causing someone serious injury (this is a UK Hospital group serving about 1.5 million patients)
The ability to optionally depracate to a lower version might be very useful for wide based compatibility.
Where I deploy flash based apps or content (I do some contract web design and coding for a few companies) I usually take the hit on functionality and sophistication and run with 6 unless the client says otherwise but I'll still argue against it. Having 99% of user able to use the content 100% is i my book delivering the goods.
Post new comment