Internet Explorer

Yup, I understand your frustration.

One thing you can do is show them a report or two from third parties (not MS, Mozilla, etc) that report on web standards compliance. http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support is a good one, but I'm sure there are others.

With that in mind, it is possible to make your site look good in every browser. There are just some rules or exceptions that you need to make just for Internet Explorer.

Trying to convince someone out of there comfort zone is pretty hard... I have same experience with this, although I converted 8 establishments systems to use browsers other than IE. The best solution for this however is to make your design work in every browser there is, even on small screens. If you manage to make sites that are cross-browser friendly, then your off to a good start, and you can stop trying to convince customers to change browsers but convince them to buy your design instead...

Your clients don't give a rats *** how IE renders. They want something that works in their browser (probably IE) or, if they're smart enough, they'll specially state they want something that works in IE, FF, and Opera. I don't really see any benefit in explaining the bad things about IE. What will that do for you? You will still be expected to make a website that works in 90% of their visitors browsers.

I am totally for educating clients, but I don't think explaining how IE is "mathematically incorrect at rendering " is time well spent.

Hey, if making a good website that worked in most browsers was easy, we'd all be out of a job. You should be thanking Microsoft's Internet Explorer

FF and Opera have their issues too, though, they're not nearly as numerous as IE.

I tend to use "graceful degradation" - giving IE6 a modified page that (hopefully) still looks good, but is missing things like alpha-transparent images. Because of its market share, a site must work in IE, but trying to make a site look identical across browser land leads directly to the mad-house.

But as others have said, the client has no interest in technology issues. I wouldn't even mention them, if I were you. Just make sure you factor enough time (and money) to deal with them. After all, the client is as powerless as you to change people's bad habits.

Depending on the client's wishes, I often use a bit of JavaScript to enhance IE's capabilities. Then there are Microsoft "expressions" - well worth considering (especially for min- max-width solutions). Of course, there is a fallback for situations where scripting is disabled: a fixed width design for a non-functional min- max-width script, for example.

Then there is Dean Edwards's IE7 JavaScript library ...

You could go for the security angle. If they're using IE 6 then they haven't run their Windows updates lately and probably have a lot of security holes. Talk about how IE is notorious for security problems, and other browsers are shown to be much better in that respect.

You can use this article as a reference, with a handy chart showing the number of security vulnerabilities found in the major browser. (Try to explain that Firefox is an open source browser and has more people involved in reporting bugs than other browsers would have).

(I recently wrote about the problem with so many people running IE 6, even though it has been available for over 8 months and was pushed out as a critical upgrade in November).

As I mentioned in the comments there, this is another indication that most people just don't know how to use their computers. They use them every day, often for many hours, and yet they don't even have a basic understanding of the software they are using.

Regarding standards, you could compare them to standards in other industry. Like a builder not following the building code or something like that. Try to think of something that would be relevant to their industry, and explain how it makes thiings more difficult to you. You could also say that they might not be able to "see" some of the new technologies because IE6 doesn't support them.

When designing the site, you still have to make it work reasonably well in IE6. I do the same as webwiz and add in some extras for newer browsers while maintaining a base design for IE 6. IT works fine, because IE6 just ignores stuff it doesn't understand, and people using it won't know they're missing anything.

Quote: For the last couple of years, we developers have been struggling with IE incompatibilities while creating and testing our sites. (...) IE7, however, was supposed to solve all these bugs, and add those all missing features. Nothing could be farther from the truth. (...) Although they've successfully fixed many bugs, it's still quite evident that their browser is still far from perfect.

A list of 58 IE7 bugs, plus good resources on dealing with IE are listed here.

I hope this is useful.