Quality assurance takes a lot of time in web development. Why is this such an issue? Very simply put - each browser has different settngs built in that support HTML code in different ways. Most currently released browsers support HTML in the same way. However, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6, released in September 2002 and replaced by IE 7 in October 2006 did not support even the most basic web standards - so much so that Microsoft had to create a special hidden tag that we developers add to all web pages. This hidden tag essentially allows us to create a second version of the page just for Internet Explorer - meaning twice the work for the same result...thus higher costs.

Because even Microsoft is soon to stop support for IE 6 (after all they released IE 8 in March 2009) and that it sometimes literally doubles the work, many developers are charging extra to create special code for IE 6 or refusing to support it at all. Frankly, we're struggling with this issue and have opted, for now, to strongly encourage people to upgrade on the sites we develop but not charge a specific "tax" for it....as long as clients understand that some of the cool things they see on the web these days simply won't work at all on IE 6.