Basically I had like an hour long discussion with a co-worker about how our site should be coded and designed. The site is a new social network focusing on new advances in coding and design. It's had it's face for about 3 weeks now and the issue has been raised due to the fact we use transparent PNG images for the icons.

My co-worker says that we should simply develop for IE7 this including the other browsers such as Firefox and Safari, simply asking the user to upgrade to IE 7 is they are using below. He uses the example of MySpace and Facebook who he says are both non-compatible with IE6 to an extent. He also says that industry top dogs say that everyone should be building sites to be compatible with newer browsers, not older. Such as Apple Computers now uses semi-transparent PNGs on their site.

Myself think that IE6 is a major part of the web sharing 32.0% of web visits. Therefore this means there are still millions of people using IE6. Where as IE7 is at 21.2%. Therefore we should be developing for IE6 even if it does mean placing background colour to all transparent PNGs. Against his argument about MySpace and Facebook is that they are not the best social networking sites online. They are the most popular no doubt about it Alexa has proved that. However this doesn't mean they have the best features or website development. Places such as Virb are much better looking with 10 times better features. Such as Microsoft being the most popular but we all know definitely not the best.

So whats your thoughts, should we encourage the users to upgrade their browser or spend a couple extra days editing all the images.

Thanks for your opinions

Greg