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Asked: 2026-05-16T01:19:08+00:00

I know this could boil down to a philosophical issue, so I don’t mean

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I know this could boil down to a philosophical issue, so I don’t mean to start a discussion on the topic. But I’m looking for the (or a couple of them) best way to resolve most issues of CSS styling in Internet Explorer 6.

I’m aware of this article on forabeautifulweb.com, and it’s recommendation to just feed IE6 users a universal plain IE6 stylesheet with just some basic styling better than the browser defaults. For my application this is not the best.

I’m also aware of the concept of “fixing” IE6’s CSS support via Javascript, and I’m sort of a fan of this idea. But I don’t know what (if any) the best one is – I know there’s several floating around in the wild. This article by Eric Meyer mentions one, but this was written almost 2 years ago, so is there a more standard script to use for this purpose now?

Can anybody point me to one or two such scripts that have been proven to be effective for updating some of IE6’s handling of CSS to behave more like a modern browser?

UPDATE: to all the people answering who are trying to convince me not to use JS to fix the problem – I am plugging my ears and humming. 🙂

Seriously, I’m not asking whether or not to use JS for this. We’ve already decided we don’t need to support IE6 and it is not worth the time for us to try to “debug” our stylesheets just for IE6. This decision is based on our audience and on our site stats for IE6 usage.

As far as all the comments about “what if the user doesn’t have JS enabled?” Well in that case a lot of stuff on our site is not going to look right anyway, so that is somewhat of a mute point.

I’ve already implemented the IE7.js that Gordon suggested, and that is quite sufficient for us to get by in IE6, with very little drawback.

Thank you all just the same for your input.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can use this library if you want to do it with JavaScript:

    IE7.js is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

    There is also CSS3Pie, which adds CSS3 support to browsers:

    PIE makes Internet Explorer 6-8 capable of rendering several of the most useful CSS3 decoration features.

    Also have a look at Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation for a design philosophy.

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