As we all know, or at least those of us that at any point ever have had to deal with browser compliance across multiple browsers, platforms and versions, it can always be a HUGE pain to get new fangled features to work properly in every browser. Who is the usual culprit we are used to getting pissed about? You guessed it Internet Exlporer, or as I like to call it, "Internet Exploder", or "That suck ass browser".

The new theme I have here uses almost 100% transparent PNG images for all the regions, and relies on the transparency and the background gradient to give the site the overall color theme. Of course Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) does not know what to do about this. It never has, and never will. This is only one of the obvious many things wrong with IE at any level of it's awesome ability to make up it's own web standards, and think they are cool or something. Forget floating issues, and padding issues. But I wont go on and on about the issues, because I'd just be preaching to the choir here.

In my attempt to tell those users of Internet Explorer, and even in my current theme, Opera where to stick it and come back with a real browser, I have set up a handful of modules in Drupal that allow me a very fine grained way to configure what browsers get what theme. In the past I have simply blocked those users all together, and given a page that just says "you suck, go away", but on this time around I wanted to at least present them with a degraded version of the site. (Using the Garland theme in this case).

By using the combination of the latest DEV version of the Switch Theme module, and the Browscap module, you can configure a HUGE list of browser types, and choose what themes to feed to each one, or to just use the default.

I have chosen to give those users for ANY version of Internet Exploer, Including IE7 and IE8, along with all versions of Opera for its ability to randomly suck at compliant layouts, the Garland theme, with some horribly obtrusive advertisements, and a pretty error message that will encourage users to come back to the site in a real browser. I figured for my own personal blog, 99% of the people coming here are techies anyway, so no harm, no foul, they would never be using a suck browser, so no biggie. For a potential client... Well, if they were using one of the suck browsers, I likely wouldn't want to do work for them anyway.

So if you want a kick in the junk, check out this site using ANY version of Internet Explorer. (It doesn't seem to render the appropriate theme for some of the IE emulators, and I'm not sure if that is the emulator sending a bogus User Agent, or if the browscap is not detecting it right)