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I know IE6 is not officially supported and the out-of-the-box rendering on IE6 is pretty ugly.

That said, is there any way to get SharePoint configured so that IE6 clients can display a publishing site? I'm not talking about full-blown, bells and whistles social web sites but just a simple page with a few web parts.

Any ideas?

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  • Add this to your masterpage: ie6countdown.com/join-us.html
    – Bart
    Jun 8, 2011 at 7:32
  • @Bart - very droll but all users are company employees and they have to use what they're given. I'm sure they'd love to have proper browsers...
    – paul
    Jun 8, 2011 at 8:30
  • I know the pain, several of our clients have the same issue, even large international banks. But that site (the statistics part), made one of them upgrade at least :) '75% of our visitors use IE6' -> after they changed it was more like 2-5% (nevertheless, first comment wasn't mentioned as a real solution, but guess you got that point)
    – Bart
    Jun 8, 2011 at 8:42
  • @Bart - I think the fact that a strategic product was screwed by having IE6 in all the subsidiaries has caused management to reconsider their position :-)
    – paul
    Jun 8, 2011 at 12:08

3 Answers 3

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Publishing sites in display mode should work in IE6. The problem is with the editing controls, ribbon, etc. which won't work properly.

If you are still seeing problems with specific controls not looking quite right, you could use Control Adapters to target IE6 and modify the rendered HTML to work around any IE quirks. Generally, for publishing sites, you would use a simplified master page and navigation controls which will probably have been designed to work with older browsers.

People editing and adminstering the site will need a newer browser.

Amazing fact: Microsoft's browser product manager is called Mark Quirk.

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  • 1
    Mark Quirk?! LOL
    – paul
    May 25, 2011 at 9:30
  • Is that why its called Quirks mode? May 25, 2011 at 12:02
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If you really wanted to do it you could create a JavaScript library that detects IE6 and does it's best to downgrade the experience. Something similar to Modernizr (http://www.modernizr.com/)

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I suggest you read the following articles which should help:

Edit: I had not understood the question was about degradation. Here are some further thoughts

Use Javascript techniques listed above to determine which browser. Then I would see whether you could leverage Variations to create an IE6 compatible site (with an IE6 masterpage) which would offer a generally degraded experience but still drive content through the site. I don't know if that's a great idea, but might bear some investigation. It would also allow you to build out content without sacrificing editing features.

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  • Thanks. Seen them already. Interesting but not enough information to help with handling graceful degradation to IE6.
    – paul
    May 25, 2011 at 10:05

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