A very simple Rails plugin to warn IE6 users, plainly and simply, that if they use IE6 to access your application, it won’t be much fun for them.
Because I am sick of ‘debugging’ code to make it work in IE6. I have worked on projects where IE6 compatibility has accounted for over half of the total time spent on the project. That is time that could have been spent making whatever it is twice as awesome, or making a second thing of equal awesomeness.
This was pretty easy to accomplish: simply add a before_filter that checks the user agent string for IE6’s foul taint, and, if it is found, renders an admonition. A cookie is set so that the user only sees the message once (per year, I guess), and a link is provided at the bottom of the page to allow them to continue to whatever led them to the site, duly warned of the nightmarish visions that await them. It’s literally a dozen lines of code.
Seriously, the hard part was writing the warning text without turning into one of those detestable “software should be free”fuckwits railing against Microsoft because they are turning a profit. Internet Explorer is free software too, and look how that turned out.
I don’t have ready access to a copy of IE6: all the testing so far has been done using Chris Pederick’s User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox. So it might not work for anybody except people using Firefox who for some reason wish they were using Internet Explorer 6. That is a thin sliver of the market. The only saving grace is that if this plugin doesn’t work, your users will never know.
./script/plugin install git://github.com/fauxparse/diaf_ie6.git
© 2009 Matt Powell (fauxparse@gmail.com)