Cubic

IE6 will officially die six years from now (i.e. it will finally be completely dead in 2016). It is mathematically proven by this chart: ( Download Excel Spreadsheet ) The data comes from the W3C Schools browser statistics page. The "Months from 10.2% Overlap" is referring to the two points where browser usage of IE5 and IE6 were both at 10.2% (time-shifted so you can see how similar the data is). The W3C site appears to stop tracking browsers at 0.5% (I'm calling that dead). My goal with this chart is to show that the data is rather similar at this point in time. Six years is a pretty bleak outlook. I also had Excel fit a line to the chart and came up with "y = -0.0093x + 0.085" with a R^2 of 0.9854 (a slightly better fit with the available data nodes). With the line, IE6 is declared dead by the W3C Schools' standard of 0.5% in 8.5 months. So, the real answer is probably somewhere between 8.5 months and six years. I'm leaning more toward five y...

I've been on a kick lately with transparent PNGs. Due to recent discoveries involving PNG8, it is high time to revisit the world of PNGs and see what else there is out there. In my previous article on PNG8 , I discussed how to get nice-looking PNG8 images by using Photoshop and pngquant. Most articles on PNG8 only cover either Fireworks or straight-up pngquant/some other command-line tool. The results aren't that great looking. Today, I stumbled across this website and tried it out in IE6. Surprisingly, the first 24-bit transparent PNG "worked": Why is this interesting? Because a pink background shows up. We are all so used to that ugly gray background in IE6 that no one has stopped to think that maybe the background color can be altered. Instead, people have gone for various hacky solutions to get full transparency. Well, now there is an intermediate, no-hacks solution between the full transparency hacks and PNG8. Here is the image I will be working with: ...

IF you know what you are doing, PNG8 can be THE answer to IE6's broken support for transparent PNGs. Ironically, the web is discovering PNG8 just as we are finally phasing out IE6. If you develop for the web occasionally, you know what a pain IE6 is. I'm currently working on a very hush-hush project (hence no blog posts lately) and it is almost the last time I have to ever support IE6. After these projects, I will never, ever, EVER have to look back (woohoo!). Background If you do a lot of web development, you know about all of the hacks in IE6 to introduce PNG transparency. My current favorite full-blown solution to 24-bit alhpa transparent PNGs in IE6 is DD_BelatedPNG . However, even that has problems and is still a hacky workaround for a problem that shouldn't have even existed for more than two minutes. The moment it was discovered, it should have been fixed. I initially dismissed this Transparent PNG8 approach because I wasn't going to spend $300 on a piece...

Digg this In general, I'm a pretty big fan of the Google Toolbar for IE. I use IE6 SP2 for pretty much all of my web surfing needs. I have Opera and Firefox installed too with plugins/extensions for the latter, but I just like IE better (although some sites are starting to be IE6-unfriendly). But this isn't about starting a "which browser is better" debate/flamewar. Instead, it is about a little bug I found today while minding my own business. Actually, I found three bugs, but only one of them is a critical issue that should never have left Google's QA department. So I was minding my own business and responding to e-mails and other such things. For many of the groups I'm on, I tend to do web searches just so I can paste a link or whatever into the e-mail. I run into an e-mail that I had indirectly answered on another mailing list several weeks ago and didn't bother pasting links so I could search the archives. But I left myself enough clues that I...