This is a rant I’ve done before, but not here. I’ve been wrestling with a wordpress theme for someone else. It’s actually something I quite enjoy. Except for one part: compatibility checking.

Now I’ve been a Linux user for several years, but I’ve got a couple of windows installations kicking about in virtual machines. As a result I am at least in a position where I can test with pretty much all browsers. Not with Safari as of yet (haven’t bothered to install the Windows Beta), but Safari’s rendering engine is based on KHTML anyway, so I assume anything that works in Konqueror will work in Safari. So far, so good.

Unfortunately problems always seem to crop up at exactly the same point in compatibility checking. Having exhausted my Linux based browsers (Firefox, Konqueror & Opera) I switch on the VMs. IE7 usually doesn’t give any trouble. But then, there’s IE6. That always seems to be trouble.

In all fairness I knew (to some extend) what I was getting myself into this time. I want an effect that is best achieved, in opinion, with semi-transparent PNGs. Unfortunately Microsoft never added support for the PNG alpha channel to IE6. That leaves just three options:
1) Accept that buttons are ugly in IE6
2) Accept that solution isn’t as elegant but buttons work everywhere
3) Keep code clean and use an ActiveX filter to make IE6 buttons less ugly, but not actually pretty

Having to deal with that sort of thing is frustrating, to say the least. But the best recent figures on browser usage I can find still make IE6 the top browser ahead of IE7, which means that for many sites not supporting IE6 is not an option.

So I end up forcing myself to with the less elegant but functional solution, and I end up hating IE6 just a little bit more. Hopefully we’ll be rid of it soon, but realistically that’ll probably take quite a while.