No, no. You didn’t get me straight. I hate debugging perfectly working websites in Internet Explorer 6 as much as the next web designer, but I can’t help but comment on the recent trend of not-IE6 pride.

As web designers, we shouldn’t be proud to exclude a portion (however small) of visitors from our websites. We shouldn’t just use conditional comments to show a big fat “GET A PROPER BROWSER N00B” at IE6 users. We shouldn’t wear our non-IE6 compliancy as a banner, beaming at ourselves. Even big games like Google and 37Signals didn’t do that.

We should try to use the above conditional comments to show a proper, however limited, version of the site to our visitors. Inform them subtly that they use an outdated browser and point them to all the good directions to replace it. Finally, say sorry if they’re not able to change their browser, but they’ll have to cope with a light-edition version of the service.

Then be proud. No need at all to confuse and annoy users just because they use an outdated browser.

And that comes from me, a well filled with user-related rantings and complaints.