Browser Redirect

Can anyone recommend a good browser redirect; basically I would like a message to appear stating that the browser (ie6) is out of date and needs updating or continue viewing page broken?

Dreamweaver includes an easy to use page redirector - it won’t show the message you want but it will redirect the browser to another page based on criteria you choose.
It’s the ’Check Browser’ behavior which you’ll find it in the ’Behaviors’ tab - it’s up to you whether you want to put loads of javascript in the head of your document, which is what this behavior does.

Alternatively, a rather more elegant method would be to use a conditional comment to load an ie6 only stylesheet which would fix the broken page, like this:
<!--[if IE 6]><link rel="stylesheet" href="assets/css/ie6fix.css" type="text/css" /><![endif]-->
(this assumes you have a stylesheet called ie6fix.css in the assets/css/ directory)

This comment goes in the <head> of the page - make sure it’s below the call to the main stylesheet. This is also a good way to brush up your css knowledge ;-)

At the moment I am unable to test under the ie6 environment, so it is very difficult to create the correct css for my sites. I also use a lot of png images.

I have studied the amount of traffic using ie6 coming to my current sites which is now very small compared to the newer browsers so I have decided to inform the older browsers users with an option to be redirect to the relevant update site.
(Microsoft should force an update or at least inform the users of this browser that an update is available!)

@rootsdiv I will deff have a look at the Dreamweaver tool, thanks!!

I think that most of the modern JS libraries will have a browser detect feature.

Here are some ideas from my favorite, JQuery:
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2006/07/browser_detect.html
http://davecardwell.co.uk/javascript/jquery/plugins/jquery-browserdetect/

I have seen a slight trend amongst MODx users: folks are not spending as much effort to ensure a good viewing experience for IE6 users.

I guess this is a good or bad thing depending on your point of view. I wish browsers would be like cartons of milk: go beyond the expiration date and you have to pour it down the sink. Designers do have a roll here: the more they focus on TODAY’s techniques and graphics the faster IE6 will die. And it definitely needs to die...

Just a thought... I currently use the fantastic tool over at http://www.browsershots.org when I am not near m IE6 testing rig and need to see how a certain page is showing in IE6 or any other browser currently deployed on systems ranging from Linux, XP, Vista, or OS X. It’s a simple and effective way to check out how your div’s are aligning in certain browsers when you don’t have a full testing environment at your disposal.

I also agree that browsers should be more like cartons of milk in the sense that they should have expiration dates and an upgrade should be required beyond a certain date. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will happen anytime soon. There a lot of people out there who have either turned off Automatic Updates in XP or have a pirated copy and cannot get updates. Therefore, they have not installed SP2 or IE7.

So for now in my own opinion, web developers and designers alike should really focus on creating web-standards compliant sites that work across multiple frameworks.

Check out browsershots.org if you get a chance!

Unfortunately it wont die any time soon. It is up to the developer how far they want to support IE6. I try to make my sites as close as possible in IE6 but if it is a little off I will weigh the error vs the effort to fix it and may be inclined to just let it go. However, your client, the one who approves the project may be using IE6...you never know.

Browsershots rocks. IT is a little slow at times but if you are not in a hurry it is the best. The only limitation is that you cant see fly out effects or other rollover type things. Netrender is on the fly so it is better for quick checks: http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/

@dev_cw:
Netrenderer is a pretty nifty tool! Thanks for the tip.

I used to have a DUAL G5 Mac for all my work and a separate PC just for IE testing. What a pain but the browser shot sites only give you so much info. If you have different pages or need to see the effects of text scaling then testing with a live browser is a must.

I now have a new Mac Pro that also runs IE6 on XP via VMwF and love it. I sold my stupid PC and got some desk space back.

Over the years I have encountered all the glorious head scratching foibles that IE brings to the table. For the most part I just design around them now. I used to scream at my monitor in total frustration, cursing the developers in Redmond that produced this awful browser.

I can’t begin to calculate the hours I have wasted tracking down IE6 issues, but hey, I am not bitter or anything.

In the 90’s I used to hate seeing warnings on sites that said "This site must be viewed with browser X" or going to sites that would not cater to Mac users. We have moved on from those days thank goodness. Some folks still dislike seeing " you need Browser X" signs on websites.

Getting back to the original question: I like the two style sheet method if it does not require too much work. One of the cornerstones of Modern Web Standards is the "design once and viewed by all" concept. If only this was a reality. The biggest road block to this utopian ideal is the stubborn market share that IE6 still has. It is dropping though. Hopefully this drop will gain warp speed. Someday it will get low enough that designers, desperate to move on and fully embrace PNG graphics and the like, and users will simply not care about IE6 anymore. The same trend and outcome happened with Netscape 4.x...

I actually used to have a very similar set-up for my working environment. I also just got a MacPro and I am running XP with Parallels so I am considering selling my PC now that it’s just taking up room on my desk.

The 2 stylesheets method seems to be the easiest for me as well. I often do run into clients who for some reason or another insist upon using IE6, so I have to spend the extra time finding bugs and applying hacks in a separate stylesheet.

@wiggy:  If you really want to display a message on your site to all IE6 users, you could use the following (as documented here => http://www.elated.com/articles/internet-explorer-conditional-comments/)

             

This conditional comment would then only show up if a user was using IE6. All other browsers would ignore this comment and would not show it. Just a thought.

I may be wrong here, but I would also assume that this would allow you to make a javascript call that would only be read by IE6. You could perhaps do something like the following:

Maybe in your body tag call you could do this: (I have not tested this, so I don’t know if it will work)


In theory, this would make IE6 display an alert window telling anyone using it that their browser was outdated. The second conditional statement would tell all other browsers to load a normal body tag without the alert.

Is this what you were looking to do?