Tech Note: IE6 Needs an Exorcism

Science | Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 2:32:31 pm PDT

If you’re using Internet Explorer version 6, you may have noticed the left sidebar seemingly disappearing.

It wasn’t really disappearing, it was being pushed down to the bottom of the page when the “Top Rated Links” area opened up. The reason: without getting too technical, Internet Explorer is simply the buggiest browser still in common use, and since we moved to a pure CSS float-based layout the bugs have been crawling out of everywhere.

This problem is fixed now, at the cost of having the columns look slightly lopsided. We’re using conditional comments to serve modified styles to IE6, so the lopsided look only shows up in that misbegotten browser.