Internet Explorer's Reign of Mediocrity

I saw this on digg.com today and I have to admit that I am one of the (apparently THOUSANDS) of people who are tired of having to tweak their standards-based code just so that IE 6 and 7 (MIcrosoft's browsers which do NOT adhere to web standards) can display their web pages the way the developer or designer originally intended. With IE's reduced market share due to the success of Firefox, Safari, and Opera, combined with Microsoft's several-year development cycle to release IE 7 - a browser that doesn't even bring IE up to date with the competition - I think people are really just starting to say, "You know what? Screw you." What do YOU think? http://digg.com/programming/Digg_this_if_you_re_tired_of_IE_costing_you_money_no_ads_involved Please comment! Opinions are welcome.

4 Comments

  • Nah, not a chance. As much as I dislike those two browsers (especially IE6), they are not going away anytime soon. I work with a lot of customers doing web development, and, looking at their web sites, I can say that we are still living in tables-for-webdesign land, smoking quirksmode. Most of the web apps I review have never even been tested in a browser different than IE.

    Some people are getting tired and want to get away, but the mass of users and developers is not moving... yet.

  • Very interesting - when I made this entry, using Safari on my Mac, everything looked fine. But as I view my own post now, I see that line breaks were completely ignored. Seems like quite the perfect example of what I'm talking about, but who knows.

    Anyway, I agree with you. IE is going nowhere any time in the near future. But the last word of your comment is what is very motivating to many people.

  • With IE, I test against 3 versions of a browser (5.5,6,7). With FireFox, there have been nearly 50 incremental releases over only a few years. Every incremental release they manage to screw around with something in the DOM and I have to tweak things to handle it. So which is really costing me more as a content developer?

  • I fail to see why folks test against old browser versions. Browsers are free, folks should only test on current versions.

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