Display a warning message to IE6 users

3/20/09 at 7:16 AM

Are you tired of visitors still using the obsolete and buggy IE6? We are. With yesterday’s launch of Internet Explorer 8, there is little excuse to not upgrading. But for those who insist on using this platform, you can warn them that your site is not (purposely) optimized for their viewing.

Here’s how to display a message only to IE6 users, asking them to upgrade their prehistoric browser.

The first thing to do is to create a style for our message. To do so, paste the following code in your style.css file:

#ie-message {
background:#C00;
text-align:center;
border-bottom:1px solid #900;
color: #fff;
position:absolute;
top:0;
padding:5px;
width:100%;
}
#ie-message a {
color: #fff;
}

Once done, open header.php and paste this code just after the <body> tag:

<!--[if lte IE 6]>
   <div id="ie-message">
      Your browser is obsolete. Please upgrade to <a href="http://www.getfirefox.com" target="_new">Mozilla Firefox</a>.
   </div>
<![endif]-->

Save the file and you’re done. Only IE6 users will see that message asking them to upgrade.

ie6-warning

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5 Comments on “Display a warning message to IE6 users”

  1. March 20th, 2009 at 7:44 am
    IE Sux says:

    I found these IE6 messages quite funny (although some are a bit crude). These could work well with this technique…
    http://blog.hugsformonsters.com/post/87657240/overly-judgemental-ie6-splash-pages
  2. April 8th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
    Dan Mihai Ile says:

    Well you could use my newest project.
    The idea inspired me to create this project on google code: http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/

    I want to translate it to as many languages as possible so that any web developper could add it to the webpages created. The initial language is very polite and suggests the use of a newer browser.
  3. May 7th, 2009 at 12:09 am
    Richard says:

    You might want to work on the message – it’s rather blunt and needs to address the target audience. Some home users who are using IE6 won’t even know what a browser is (and it might not be IE, could be MSN Explorer or some other variant). Corporate users usually can’t switch from IE6 until ALL their intranet web apps have been upgraded – there are many huge companies still in this state.
  4. June 6th, 2009 at 12:39 am
    Karl says:

    Why ‘upgrade to Mozilla Firefox’? What’s with this Mozilla promotion. There are other good browsers, like Safari, Google Chrome and especially Opera.
  5. June 24th, 2009 at 7:10 am
    Al says:

    Dan Mihai Ile, awesome work! I will use it on my website!

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