Today, my friend was kind enough to point out some errors in my site design that I had overlooked. My transparent .png images were not transparent (they were gray), and my content was pushed down about 300 pixels too far.

I said, “No! Say it ain’t so! What browser are you using!?”
He said, “IE6“.
I said, “Upgrade yer friggin’ browser!”, and signed off to go fix my site.

I use Mac, but I also have Windows and IE7 installed just so I can check for errors on sites in Explorer, but I don’t have IE6. First, I prayed that there was a humongous drop in IE6 users recently, and I wouldn’t have to do anything. Unfortunately, after seeing that there was 30.7% IE6 users in February, I figured it’d be in my best interest to fix the problem.

Now, I didn’t want to install any more versions of Explorer if I didn’t have to, so I searched for an online solution that would allow me to see what my site looked like in IE6 without installing it on my computer. During the search, I came across a letter written by a disgruntled designer that cheered me up and relieved a bit of stress for a few minutes. He had summed up everything I was feeling, and more, by letting IE6 know exactly how he felt: Dear IE6, I Hate You

As I continued my search for help, I came across a superb little online tool called NetRenderer that allows you to check how a website looks in Internet Explorer 7, 6, and 5.5 (no, I’m not fixing it for 5.5!)
The tool showed me this:

That was no fun to see. In fact, my left eye started twitching and it has yet to stop.

I knew why the content was pushed down, but unfortunately, it was pretty time consuming to redo the code/graphics differently to suit IE6 (and still look right in the newer browsers).

The real problem came with the grayed out transparent .png images. I really wanted to use .png instead of .gif (mostly because shadow looks better), but I had read that IE6 won’t show transparent .pngs properly.
With a little help from SitePoint forums, I found a great solution. If you need to use transparent .png images and are worried about how they appear in IE6, here is your solution!

I learned something today, so it’s not all bad.

I don’t hate you IE6, but I’d rather not see you again.