Decaflon

There's plenty you could do with browser sniffing and adding a small DIV to the top or something advising people to use a browser from this millennium.

There was a designer who used browser sniffing to server a completely grayscale page to IE, and every other browser got the real, colorful edition, though I've since forgotten who it was.

That sounds pretty darn neat. So you're saying that this chap managed to add some code that, when the site was being viewed through an IE browser, loaded up a totally seperate page?

That would be hugely useful for mine, given that it HATES IE completely.

A simple page advising the user to get FF or Opera, etc, and an option to 'continue at your own risk', would be pretty neat!

If IE is detected, then a new stylesheet is added to the page:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://shiftingpixel.com/wp-content/themes/shifting2/style-IE6.css" media="screen" />
<![endif]-->

And here is the code added when IE is detected.

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<div id="upgradeYourBrowser">
<h1><strong>Please</strong> upgrade your browser.</h1>
<strong>Everything</strong> will be better if you use <a href="http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=affiliates&amp;id=38695">Firefox</a>. It's <strong>entirely free</strong> and it only takes a minute to <a href="http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=affiliates&amp;id=38695">download and install</a>.
</div>
<![endif]-->

Related reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_sniffing

Note: There's probably a lot more people who could explain this better but that's the basics.

Now don't get me wrong I am a FF and I can understand popping up something like this if a user ran IE 5. But is it really time yet to be phasing out IE 6 from your site? I would assume most of the users that visit your site are technical and would be using FF, IE7, or Safari but there may be a few stumblers who use IE6 and get turned off.

I hate it when I get a message saying please view this site in IE, so I can imagine users using IE6 would also be annoyed (Even though you are doing them a favor). Whats a worse UX a few pixels being out of place or a big error message in your face.

My concern is that they would think the disjointed design would be through poor coding (which it might be :-S) as opposed to a poor browser, though I fully appreciate where you're coming from with that.

I want to inform people of this fact as best I can, yet also allow them to carry on viewing the site regardless of their browser.

(I have no idea how to get it working in IE6, sadly. Though I know next to nothing about coding and have someone else writing it for me.)

All websites on the internet should display correctly in A-grade browsers, as defined by Yahoo. At the moment of writing a huge percentage of users is still using Internet Explorer 6, thus you should make your site work correctly in IE6.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/

I'm not saying browser detection is a good course of action to take. Just explaining how it was done. :)

I think we need to get Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera in one big room together and make them all kiss and make up!

I'm more than happy for anyone with a spare for hours (weeks?) to have a look through the code and advise/re-write the areas that would improve multi-browser support - partiuclarly with reference to IE6. I simply don't have the knowledge to do this.

All websites on the internet should display correctly in A-grade browsers, as defined by Yahoo.

I think you have the wrong end of what they were saying there, mate. All that pages does is show what browsers support the YUI JS library well.