Yeah. Oh well I'll just do what I want I guess cuz I don't see why Zera would have such an issue with ads showing up for IE users unless he's a IE fanboy.

Not sure how you got that impression, considering I just slammed IE in my most recent post. I've been an avid Opera fanboy going on 2+ years now.

Like Silver Shadow said, I just don't think it's fair to coerce users into switching their browsers. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people do use IE just because it's included with Windows; but I don't think they should necessarily be punished for it. I'm sure some people also prefer it for their own reasons. Just let people know that the site is not fully compatible with IE and let them make the decision for themselves. If they still complain about incompatibilities, then point them to the notice.

Sorry if I sounded rude in my post, it wasn't intentional.
No, I think the ad idea is good. I think that having these 2 ads next to the "best viewed in..." message might help people disover and/or use other browsers.

IE have the, somewhat stupid (although useful to fix its damn bugs) and probably proprietary, "conditional comments".

I think that's at least a lot better and more elegant than having to rely on IE-specific HTML/CSS parsing glitches, which is a hacky, fragile, and easily-broken way of handling the issues, though. If we ever move ticalc.org's HTML over to a more modern CSS/HTML setup we may have to end up using them to get it to work properly in all the IE browsers.

Normally, I feel that it's best to support all browsers equally whenever possible, but it's understandable that sometimes there are compromises that have to be made and it becomes too costly to support everything out there. If Omnimaga were a commercial business or something, it might make sense to support many versions of IE because that would avoid leaving out a significant number of customers, but obviously it isn't and, like ticalc.org, no one gets paid for the time and work they put into the site, let alone for supporting additional browsers.

I can sympathize with web developers when it comes to these compatibility issues. A little while after I was hired at ticalc.org, I (as an experiment) did a mock-up of the front page using external CSS and standards-compliant HTML which looked okay in Konqueror and Firefox. When another staff member tested the rendering of various versions of IE for me, it was clear that that will probably be the biggest challenge and possibly where a lot of the work will be spent if we ever tackle this project. And this was just straight HTML/CSS, without yet trying to implement any Javascript or dynamic-type stuff. But at least the conditional comments thing that even older versions of IE have will really help. (It's also unfortunate that the site wouldn't render as well in text-based browsers like Lynx as it does with the current table-based layout, even though they say you shouldn't use tables for laying out pages. However, it would at least be usable.)

Anyway, I think the best approach would be to go ahead and have the ad buttons somewhere on the page like DJ Omnimaga mentioned, maybe with a neutral message sort of like “Some parts of this site may not work properly in Internet Explorer. We recommend using [whatever]”. Having a redirection page or anything that might be considered intrusive would probably just invite complaints, but I don't think anyone being reasonable would have a problem with small ad buttons that don't get in the way.