Relive the ugly years of the Web with IE6ify bookmarklet

People often forget just how much of a monopolistic juggernaut Microsoft once was: Internet Explorer 6, at its peak in 2004, thanks to its bundling with Windows XP, was used by almost 90% of Web surfers. Then a little miracle happened: Firefox 1 launched and IE has lost market share ever since.

Today, just 12% of Internet surfers still use IE6 -- mostly thanks to China, South Korea and other Asian countries -- and its decline will surely continue until the aging, I-laugh-at-your-standards browser dies a painful and ignoble death.

But, just like the bawdy and animated phosphorescence of Geocities, the misaligned madness of IE6 will always have a special place in our hearts. For most Dot-com Bubble developers, off-by-one-pixel CSS borders and disgustingly convoluted hacks to make IE6 and Firefox look alike were a way of life.

That's why one enterprising developer has created IE6ify, a bookmarklet that processes your current page with the IE6 rendering algorithm -- or its best approximation, anyway. Drop it onto your bookmark bar, head over to your favorite site, and hit the button. Marvel as IE6ify breaks and contorts innocent HTML and CSS until it screams. You might have to hit the button a few times to make the changes more noticeable.

Don't try it on Download Squad, though. Our layout is so awesome -- so standard -- that the bookmarklet hardly does a thing!

Tags: bookmarklet, browsers, css, firefox, html, ie6, ie6ify, internet explorer, internet explorer 6, InternetExplorer, InternetExplorer6, javascript, standards, web

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