The truth is that it is all because of HSBC (the worlds largest bank) and it’s reliance on ie6 for internal stuff and public facing stuff. OK, so that claim is somewhat unfounded, but not completely untrue.

Anyway I hope Microsoft seriously decides to put the ax to the root and kill both ie6 and ie7 when they release ie9. It is truly a shame what they have done to the web development community.

(btw here’s an interesting article…http://www.webdevelopment2.com/hsbc-direct-doesnt-support-firefox-30-another-reason-to-dump-ie-60/)

* {
display: none;
}

If that’s your site, I think that you should validate your markup ;)

http://killbillsbrowser.com
NB the site I link to links to explorerdestroyer.com — explorerdestroyer.com is all well and good except that the code it provides does use browser sniffing (which is faulty and appears for search engines, Opera, etc, etc, etc) so if you use the explorer destroyer code, then you should probably also do a serverside detect (to keep the code out of google’s way) and wrap it in IE conditional comments (to avoid annoying Opera users)

** Yay for IE Conditional Comments!! THE good thing about Virus Explorer!

“Lets be honest if any of us tried openly to say we are not supporting ie6 in web design. Our bosses would just say ok their’s the door don’t let it catch you in the arse on the way out.”
This is the sad truth. Luckily I make stuff mostly for myself and when I do it for work I hold enough clout to say “let’s use this to convert people to anything but IE” — it doesn’t lose customers ;) because it’s not on pages with the company’s branding on them, and/or not an “e-commerce page”. Really though, on personal pages you should just ditch all ie hacks. Work is a different story but for personal stuff, screw IE.

“I spend averagely 80% of my time fixing Ie6 problems”
– 80%, yup, that’s ther figure I always gave too when I still felt I had to code for Virus Explorer.

“IE is a target for hackers only because it’s the most used. When everyone moves to Firefox, then it will become the target. If you don’t like IE7, then move everyone to Firefox. At least it is compliant with CSS and it beats the hell out of IE6.”
IE is mostly the hacker’s choice because of its market share. MOSTLY. Saying that that is the only reason is just plain wrong. The probability of a bug being discovered in code during its development increases with each developer who views the code. Far more developers see any given component of Firefox than what see the code for any part of IE, so it almost goes without saying that it will be more secure, regardless of market share. The question then isn’t whether or not it’s inherently more secure, but HOW MUCH more secure it actually is.

What’s compliant with CSS? Certainly not IE7. LOL. IE7 supports a good number of selectors but is still months/years behind Firefox/Opera/Safari/Konqueror!! The number of actual properties and values it supports is now much higher, although 60% of what it does now it does incorrectly (and I don’t call that standards support by a long shot)

“I’ve heard of speed issues with IE7…slow page loads, primarily. Turn off the phishing filter.”
And turn on http pipelining… Except that unlike Firefox, Opera et cetera, I don’t think that IE offers that as an option yet, because it’s a living fossil. Oops. (NB pipelining can cause problems sometimes, largely through race conditions, I think. So the question arises, is speed everything?)

“- They tried IE7, didn’t know what happened to the menu bar, panicked, and uninstalled it (which is really pathetic, but I know it happens).”
Actually this was me. IE7 I saw coming for ages, but I never knew what improvements it would offer over IE6. When it did arrive, it had no menu bar, broke even more websites than what its stupid fossil cousin IE6 did, took 999 years to load, and made the Gorgon sisters look ravishing. I didn’t uninstall it, but I did tell some friends of mine to not install IE7 until they got a new computer.

I ate my words telling them not to upgrade though; IE7 is only 8 years behind the current technology, to IE6′s 10 year lag.

Either way though, IE6 is horrid and nobody with half a brain should ever use it (except where forced to at work, and even then if this is you, you should be ashamed of yourself. Get a proper job at a respectable company)