Whenever you design a website, whether you start from scratch or you are doing your own design in WordPress, you have to take the non-compliant browser IE6 into your design considerations — at least for a while longer. The latest stats from Browser Stats show that use of IE6 has dropped to less than 20%. But your beautiful tiny (hopefully) proper code will look crappy in IE6 if you don’t incorporate workarounds to make it look good. All of which is documented extensively elsewhere on the web, of course.

IE7 is better, but not perfect. It got up to about 27% of market share a few months ago, but is dropping slightly again.

Microsoft has finally given in to creating a standards compliant browser with IE8. I’ve tested it a tiny bit, and so far, my sites look the same in IE8 as in all the other (good) browsers. Yeah! I’m looking forward to the official release; maybe then IE5.5 and older can finally die their long-overdue deaths.

I’m officially giving up forever on IE5.5 and earlier IE browsers. Yes, 3 or 4 people per month still visit my old design site using that horrid excuse for a browser, but at some point, it’s just not worth the many extra hours to code for. Sorry, you IE5 hangers-on! I’d really rather paint or learn something new. And really, no offense intended, but there are many excellent browsers to choose from that work very, very well. I have FOUR on my desktop that are great, and 2-3 additional ones that are better than IE5.5 and IE6.

Here are links to some of the best browsers — all FREE!:

• Firefox — my personal favorite
• Opera — also a very nice, very functional browser
• Google Chrome — I’m very impressed with this new browser from Google!
• Mozilla — makes browsers for Linux, Windows and Mac
• Apple’s Safari — a very handsome browser, now available for Windows, too
• Internet Explorer, versions 7 and 8 (beta) — if you must

Alas, an old favorite, Netscape, is gone for good (except for the legacy versions still installed on some of our systems ).

Related posts:

1. Designing Your Own Theme for WordPress, part II
2. Designing Your Own Theme for WordPress, part I
3. Site Tested Cross-Browser — Known Issues