5 Most Bizarre jQuery Plugins To Convince Your Visitors To Stop Using IE6

April 19, 2010 by Roman | 7 Comments

Let’s face the truth – we all hate tweaking sites that we code to make sure they look the same in IE6 as in all other browsers. And it’s not because of us being lazy, there are literally tons of compatibility issues with IE6.

The list of the bugs is really long, but just to name a few: floats and margins bug, borders bug and many, many more. Fortunately, there are some hacks and workarounds that help overcome most of these problems, for example a well known underscore hack, where CSS properties that have underscore symbol in front of the them, can be taken into account only by IE6 (haha, this hack itself seems to be one of those compatibility issues :) ).

I personally spent many hours trying to figure out how to make layouts, fonts and borders look OK in IE6. With gaining more experience, I started spending less and less time on fixing these issues, but still don’t like wasting time doing this.

Unfortunately Internet Explorer 6 still holds a large market share (18.41% according to NetMarketShare, but it’s really more than 20% if we include other editions, e.g. Maxton and others).

Some day we all will have a dilemma: to continue tweaking our sites to make sure they are fine in IE6, or try convincing our users that IE6 is most unsecured browser in the world and it’s time to move to newer versions.

Below are listed 5 most bizarre jQuery plugins that can help you convince your visitors to abandon IE6 in favor of a better browser. They are ordered by the level of dislike for IE6, that web developers should have when they appeal to their visitors to stop using this browser.

I tried all of them to make sure they work well and created demo pages for them as well, so feel free to share this article with everyone still using IE6, who knows may be it will have some effect :) . If you would like to view demo of these plugins, you probably need IETester as you don’t have IE6 installed on your work machine, do you? ;)

1. Ultimatum: jQuery Crash

jQuery Crash is a tiny jQuery plugin that does exactly what its name suggests – it crashes IE6. This is probably the most serious way of convincing, you must really hate IE6 and perhaps spent a lot of precious time fixing IE6 issues.
Download plugin
View demo

2. Extreme Warning: IE 6 Blocker Script

jQuery Blocker Script Plugin
IE 6 Blocker Script is a jQuery plugin that displays a warning message saying that this page cannot be viewed using IE6 and suggests using Firefox instead. You can easily change plugin’s code and display any other message, for example I added Chrome browser.
Download plugin
View demo

3. Serious Warning: Blacknwhite

jQuery Blanknwhite Plugin
Blacknwhite is a jQuery plugin that makes the page appear only in black and white colors under IE6 browser. You can also let your visitors know somewhere on your site that this is not a bug, but rather a reminder that they are using an outdated browser.
Download plugin
View demo

4. Suggestion: jReject

jQuery jReject Plugin
jReject is another jQuery plugin to convince your visitors to break of the habit of using IE6 browser. It displays very nice and polite warning saying that IE6 is out of date and should be upgraded to a newer version of IE or a different browser.
Download plugin
View demo

5. Friendly Reminder: Bad Browser

jQuery Bad Browser Plugin
Bad Browser is a simple jQuery plugin that detects IE6 and displays a sliding message at the top of the page to your visitors. Once the user closes the warning message, this plugin creates a cookie to make sure this user doesn’t get repeated warnings. I changed it a little bit to suggest using IE8 instead of IE7.
Download plugin
View demo

Of course, there are some corporate standards that won’t allow you to make use of any of these plugins on your employer’s site of sites of your customers, but if you run a funny, non-serious site, then why not? :) I’m personally thinking about adding a friendly reminder on my site.

  1. 7 Comments

  2. Cyril Gupta
    May 13, 2010

    I am not running a non-serious site, but I can’t really spend so many hours debugging the CSS on my site for a lousy browser that knows nothing.

    Users must really upgrade from Ie6 now, it’s about time.

    So I’ve blocked ie6 on my website (http://astro91.com) and there are helpful links to chrome, firefox and ie8.

    Hopefully it will motivate some people to change their browsers.

    We should all do that.

  3. Roman
    May 13, 2010

    Nice move Cyril! I think over time more people will follow. Nobody is checking their sites in IE5.5 now, the same will happen to IE6, it’s just a matter of time.

  4. Michael Hall
    May 13, 2010

    as a developer i whole heartedly agree with this pages mission, but we must also remember that many people in corporate offices can’t upgrade their browser – but at least it may get them to contact their it department. nobody corporation insists on using old anti-virus definitions or out of date office suites so they should also update their browsers at least once every 6 months, once they can be fairly certain that most of the bugs have been killed in the new browsers – so displaying a warning might be better than completely blocking your site.

  5. Roman
    May 13, 2010

    Yes, it’s true Michael. Quite recently I worked in a large local company, and almost all employees (except IT team) used IE6 – around 400 people. IT staff could use whatever they wanted. But there was a major reason for this – all local business apps where written long time ago for IE6 (there was no IE7 at that time), and it’s quite risky (and can be quite expensive) for business to move to newer versions. Since only one version of IE can be installed (well, tech-savvy guys can install more then one, but not usual office employees), they are stuck with IE6.

    Fully agree about warning, just letting users know about other browsers can be a good start :) But it’s better to avoid doing this on very serious websites.

  6. Cyril Gupta
    May 13, 2010

    The truth is guys I had forgotten that IE6 exists and gleefully designed my website to work well with Ie8, FF, Chrome, Safari…

    Yesterday someone ran the website on an old pc which still has ie6 installed (in addition to chrome), and the view looks horrendous. I checked my status and found that about 20% of my users were using ie6.

    Now that’s certainly a lot, and eventually I might have to re-work the code, but I can’t do that now… Let’s see what happens

  7. Roman
    May 13, 2010

    I would recommend checking site in as many browsers as possible – at least Firefox, Chrome and all versions of IE. To check in all IE versions you can install a great application called IETester. There is also “IE Collection”, but I personally prefer IETester.

  8. Michael Pehl
    Jul 10, 2010

    I can not recommend IETester (did not work like expected for me!) but I can recommend http://browsershots.org or similar sites.
    I dropped all IE6 support on http://bewerber.studenten-vermittlung.com because mostly students use this site and I am really sick of IE6.

    Mabye it was not the right decision but stats tell me that only about 3% of all users try to watch the site with IE6.

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