I read Jeffrey Zeldman's post on WEB STANDARDS SECRET SAUCE and the bit that stood out to me is the somewhat obvious point that it's mostly not "their" fault they're using Internet Explorer. They don't know any better. They don't know that the page would look and feel much better in a better browser. Perhaps it would even work better. They don't know that we hate designing for a broken browser. They don't see all the tape and glue holding the hideous mess together. It's not their job to.
Our job (considering nobody seems to be able to talk sense to MS) is to either put up with it like we have been or educate our users that there's a difference. A better way. For both of us.
The latter is a huge burdensome task but the former isn't so easy either. For some of you you'll say (rightly or wrongly) that you cannot educate your users so you must continue fighting the the many-headed Internet Explorer dragon. The rest of you will agree that if our job is to give the user/customer the best experience we can give them, then sometimes that'll include educating them on the parts of our world where a little knowledge will go a long way to achieving that.
I don't know how best to do this with your users, I don't even know how to do it with mine, but it's something I'm going to work on.
Think of it this way
If you go to a site that requires the Flash Player plugin and you don't have it installed, the site simply tells you that you need it and where to get it. And I wouldn't seriously try to stretch this analogy that far you could also point out that the site's creator didn't try and build something that would work for us fools who didn't have the Flash plugin installed. He/she simply told us that in order to get the full experience of this site, you'll need this tool*.
Granted there are key differences between requiring a plugin and suggesting a browser. And the irony of using a flash site as an example when discussing web standards is not lost on me. However the point I'm trying to make is that taking the step to be vocal about the problem and suggesting that the user would have a better experience (not just on your site, but all over the web) if they installed pretty much any other browser than Microsoft's isn't so crazy as it first appears. Yes I'll be shouting at windmills, but if enough of us start doing it maybe they'll start to believe us. If companies that are paying good money to have great products built for them keep hearing that they won't get their full money's worth on IE, they'll start to believe it.
One thing I might try
On my SAAS sites I usual have a FAQ of "what do I need to run this software?" and the answer is usually “...nothing but a computer with an Internet connection. But to get the full experience I suggest you use a decent browser like Firefox and Safari...” and I'll helpfully provide links to the download pages for those browsers.
I'm also now considering having a bare bones IE stylesheet (something useable, but not something I'm going to kill myself trying to get to work perfectly on IE) and a bar at the top that suggests that they'll get a better experience of this site (and most of the web) if they try out any one of these free browsers instead of Internet Explorer. I'll have a link to "learn why" where I'll attempt to outline in a brief and un-technical way why IE is a poor choice for modern web browsing. I'll have a few side-by-side screenshots of the same page in Safari, Firefox and IE. And if they still don't see the merit in it, at least they've made a conscious choice to stick with using IE.
Related: my post on why UHY doesn't support Internet Explorer
*Or he/she created a non-flash version of the site. But let's pretend they didn't, ok!
