Supporting Internet Explorer in 2004
February 23, 2004 | 
39 Comments
Most folks know that Internet Explorer has horrible support for Web standards. Many forward-thinking and well intentioned Web designers and developers have felt the pain and shared their stories about the World’s most used Web browser. It’s like a fricken zombie walking around with it’s head cut off. Die already, will ya? :)
As I recently said in an email to Craig V. who’s been like my own personal IE tester, and was actually the first person to notice and let me know about my latest Internet Explorer rendering problem:
I hate IE. It’s like a bowl in a china shop balancing on a 30 pole that’s balancing on a soccer ball with ten five year-olds running around it.
Some how I broke my design in IE by adding a post with an image and a fairly simple style. It didn’t like the 5 pixels of padding for some reason and the sidebar had disappeared, rendering the site less than functional. I sorted it out, not really to my total satisfaction, but it now at least works correctly in IE.
Which brings me to the point of this post. In today’s Web, if you want to do it right, you have to have lots of patience, be ready for some hard work and be willing to make sacrifices to support IE.
I’ve got a validating, standards compliant Web site here that doesn’t render exactly how I’d like it to in any browser because of the workarounds that I’ve made for it to function in IE.
I can live with it, but I’m not happy about it. It was quite a bit of extra work and now I’m left with something that isn’t quite what I’d hoped and designed for. I imagine I could have used hacks to sort some of them out, but I really try and avoid hacks. I’d rather have it rendered a tad different than have my code chock full of hacks. But that is a trade-off I’m willing to take, some others may see it different and that’s fine too.
This isn’t to say the other browsers are perfect. I’ve got unsorted bugs in both Safari and Firefox for Windows, both in the sidebar. It’s just that I’m pretty sure those will be worked out either in the next update (as I think they are browser bugs) or without having to break something else. At least those bugs don’t break the function of the site and I’ve got some hope of support as they’re occurring in “living” browsers.
It’s like this with many projects I work on and will be until IE gets updated with better standards support or becomes obsolete. It’s a fact of life. IE 6.0 is as good as dead — it’s like anti-vaporware.
I don’t really have a strong point here, only that while I think it’s worth it to design and develop with Web standards, if your going to do so — be prepared to face off against the biggest, baddest, Web site destroying, undead monster of them all. I can almost guarantee you and Internet Explorer won’t see eye to eye and it can take quite a bit of work at times to sort everything out.
As Nick said recently in a great (and completely unrelated) comment over at Whitespace:
Anyway, the rule is “form ever follows function”…keywords here are ‘ever’ as in never without, and ‘follows’ as in always comes after.
In 2004, with Internet Explorer support, there are times when you need to sacrifice a little form to fully ensure function.
Filed under: Web Development
Comments
1. Scrivs said:
Since this is a family blog I will keep my real thoughts to myself. However, the web and its professionals are trying to take the web to another level and IE is the only thing keeping us back.
IE’s rendering sucks.
It has to power to break a man’s will sometimes. When people complain about CSS and Web Standards they look at IE and point and say “See, if he doesn’t like it, then it must not be right”.
If you get it right in 6 then you gotta fix it for 5.5. Get those two right, then you gotta try 5.0. After that you probably broke everything again for 6. The only real function in IE is the back and refresh buttons.
Posted on February 23, 2004 07:07 PM | #
2. Keith said:
Scrivs, this isn’t really a family blog, even though MT-Blacklist sometimes thinks it is. I’ll say it for you as I bet you tried and the filter put the kibosh on it.
“IE f*cking sucks.”
Your example of having to jump back and forth fixing errors because of IE is right on…but really a huge understatement. It can be much worse that you imply.
Posted on February 23, 2004 07:16 PM | #
3. Nollind Whachell said:
Two things keeping me back from jumping over to Firefox like this second (which I would really like to do).
1) No popup for multiple passwords on a page (like previous versions of Firebird seemed to have or was it just one version).
2) Windows Theme support, as I have a very dark theme (using StyleXP) and Firefox doesn’t change the black text to white text (matching the theme), thus I can barely see the menus in Firefox (dark text on a dark background).
Anyone know how to enable these things in Firefox? Actually, if anyone knows of a really dark Firefox Skin (greyish/black) that would suffice instead of Windows Theme support.
Posted on February 23, 2004 07:42 PM | #
4. Scrivs said:
I know this isn’t a family blog, I was just using that in reference to what I really want to say. I have been working on a layout it took me a good number of hours (hell maybe days) to fix somes small little spacing issues. I can handle a browser being somewhat broken, but IE seems to have different issues at different times with different designs. Everytime I think I got one problem nailed, another crops up in another design. I could only imagine the frustration some would feel who are beginning to dive into CSS.
Maybe I should have stuck with backend programming.
Posted on February 23, 2004 07:44 PM | #
5. Chris Vincent said:
As Bowman put it, it’s the IE Factor.
These are the facts. As Scrivs said, I can stand a *little* bugginess in browsers. As far as I’m concerned, it’s actually a little bit of fun to solve those problems, because usually it’s logical. IE on the other hand has no apparent reason behind its screw-ups. There’s usually no predicting what might happen in a given design, and problem solving becomes a parade of frustration.
Posted on February 23, 2004 08:46 PM | #
6. huphtur said:
I wish more people would understand that IE is NOT the internet. Yes, we web nerds know better, but the majority of people out there does not know and does not care about other browsers. Unless… we show them.
I’ve been slowly converting friends and some people at my work. It’s very hard to convince them, but once they see the advantages, they are sold right away. (Mac people are more receptive then windows users)
Therefor I would really like to see more awareness about a ‘better browser’ not only on tech sites, but also on sites that are non tech related.
What about sites we produce for our assorted clients? Would this be the correct place to do this? Would a client allow this?
Posted on February 23, 2004 11:34 PM | #
7. Michael Czepiel said:
I’ve just finished a few projects which were greatly affected by the “IE Factor”. Needless to say, I just want to wring the neck of anybody that feels IE is “good enough” and expects their browser to do all the same tricks as modern web-standards-based browsers. Unfortunately, we have no solution. 98% of my campus uses IE. Until recently Netscape 4 was the only alternative on any public terminals. (Thankfully they have put on mozilla 1.5 and firebird .7 since the last imaging) Unfortunately, the increase in alternatives does no lead to an increase in people actually using them. People really need to be slapped when they reach for the IE icon, a good pavlovian training regiment is in order.
We really need to organize some anti-IE movement that doesn’t just sound like us bitching about having to invalidate code with hacks and make sacrifices to ensure compatibility. Anybody up for an Internet Explorer Blackout Week?
Posted on February 23, 2004 11:54 PM | #
8. Seb said:
Many standards-based sites have hidden paragraphs that only appear to older browsers, which explain what web standards are and why compatible browsers are a Good Thing.
Maybe we should start putting similar paragraphs at the top of pages that only appear in IE?
Posted on February 24, 2004 01:49 AM | #
9. Seb said:
Is it just me, or is it a touch ironic that one of this page’s Google ads reads:
Free Internet Browsers
Get the newest version of Internet Explorer and other free browsers
(I think ‘newest version of Internet Explorer’ ranks as an oxymoron almost as highly as ‘military intelligence’…)
Posted on February 24, 2004 01:52 AM | #
10. andreas said:
I think Seb’s idea is worth considering. Why not display a carefully crafted message to IE users pointing them to the advantages they could gain from using a different browser?
Of course, many would not want and many more not be able to install a different browser. But I suppose a significant portion of users simply has not thought about their browser choice.
My father, for example, has always used IE because it came with Windows. But when I told him about the security issues and the convenience of tabbed browsing he switched to Mozilla without a second thought.
Perhaps there should be a second Browser Upgrade Campaign?
Posted on February 24, 2004 04:04 AM | #
11. ben said:
Has anyone tried viewing www.maniacalrage.com with IE?
Posted on February 24, 2004 05:13 AM | #
12. Mark Wubben said:
The way people currently think about IE makes it unnessecary for Microsoft to improve IE. There has been some buzz about this some months ago. Therefore, if we can get a lot of people using a different browser Microsoft will have to improve IE. Of course, we need to achieve this well before Longhorn comes out, to give Microsoft some time to fix IE.
I like Seb’s idea (I’ll definately implement it on a new version of my site) and the idea of the IE Blackout Week (though I rather have a IE Blackout millenium).
Posted on February 24, 2004 05:15 AM | #
13. Michael Heilemann said:
I’d be up for an anti-IE campaign on my site.
Really what someone (ehm…) should so is set up a page with the appropriate code and text for people to copy and implement on their sites.
Posted on February 24, 2004 05:41 AM | #
14. Chris Hester said:
Bryan Bell has an anti-IE logo you can use as part of his campaign.
“IE on the other hand has no apparent reason behind its screw-ups.”
Although it’s tempting to think so, often a solution to a bug throws light on the reason (trigger) for it.
I can’t recommend this site highly enough for learning more about a variety of IE bugs and fixes:
http://positioniseverything.net
Posted on February 24, 2004 05:59 AM | #
15. Pat said:
Tim Bray wanted to start a new browser upgrade campaing but it hasn’t really taken off, only a few items are posted on the follow up to his first essay.
So, let’start contributing more graphics and text for people to put on their sites.
Posted on February 24, 2004 08:30 AM | #
16. Nollind Whachell said:
Yes, I visited Maniacal Rage with IE more than a few times. I’m wondering when he’s going to change it to a larger font with “Hey you f*cking idiotic Internet Explorer user!”, just to REALLY get your attention. Hehe!
As for an Anti-IE campaign, well that’s fine but you still have to target it from a user’s standpoint not a developer’s standpoint. If you whine about not being able to code properly, the average IE user isn’t going to care about your problems. If you tell them that IE can install viruses on their computer without them knowing it, then they will wake up and think about switching because this will become their problem. As Andreas said, security, or the lack of it in IE, is the biggest reason to get off it.
For myself, I was using a free utility called PopThis! in the meantime to kill popups on IE, of which some of them could be auto installing viruses. That’s another thing that a lot of Windows users don’t know. A lot of the popup killers for IE don’t kill the popup, they just hide it, therefore, an auto installing virus will still install since the page is still being loaded by the browser, but it just’s not being displayed.
BTW I finally found a Theme called Breeze that works with my dark StyleXP visual style. So far so good with Firefox, although I still haven’t found a way to get multiple passwords to popup automically in it. Oh well, hopefully someone will come out for an extension for it.
Posted on February 24, 2004 10:35 AM | #
17. Michael Czepiel said:
It’s nice to see that people have already taken up the anti-IE banner. Unfortunately, alluded to previously and articulated by Nollindm, ” If you whine about not being able to code properly, the average IE user isn’t going to care about your problems.” We developers are a selfish lot this is all we really care about. Users obviously have no interest in our problems so that’s a dead end. Asking people to change their browser is a rather presumptuous demand. Obviously, we could try to scare them into switching browsers with the whole security angle, but it seems most people have been desensitized by their insecure surroundings to the point of total apathy. Worst of all Windows XP SP2 is slated to rectify the pop-up situation which is the only obvious problem with IE as far as consumers are concerned. Unless it’s blatantly in their face and annoying they probably won’t care. So while Microsoft patches up the only obvious consumer complaint with Ie, our needs will go unanswered and our pleas that mozilla/firefox/whatever is a better browser will fall on deaf ears as users rejoice in IE’s “innovative” pop-up blocking.
it’s radical but I propose anybody with a high-profile site just stop coding for IE. If it validates and works correctly in standards supporting browsers IE should be fine. The true path would involve not hacking IE allowances at all much in the way most of us now disregard NN4. If we got enough force behind this we could literally “Take back the web” as Firefox intends.
Obviously, a movement like this would be difficult and most people aren’t interested as understandably most of the world uses IE. A more interesting campaign would be a guerilla pop-up war against IE. They’re defenseless unless the user has gone out of their way, just inundate them with popups. (Probably not the bet idea but I think everybody just grinned mischievously at the thought of millions of people being flooded with popups and finally just giving up on IE).
And finally a closing thought. I know firebird had an IE skin but somebody needs to make a build of “IE7” which would just be Firefox totally masquerading as IE. If you honestly just switched the browser most people wouldn’t notice the difference aside from the look. Kind of like the coffee commercials…
Posted on February 24, 2004 10:58 AM | #
18. Eric TF Bat said:
A little CSS to help this nascent campaign along:
<style>
.nocss, .ie, .ie5, .ie6 { display: none; }
* html p.ie { display: block; }
* html span.ie5 { display: inline; d\isplay: none; }
* html span.ie6 { d\isplay: inline; }
</style>
and then…
<h4 class=”nocss”>Please disregard
the following message</h4>
<p class=”nocss”>
(It doesn’t apply to you, but unfortunately
your current browser isn’t set up to allow
us to remove it.)
</p>
<p class=”ie”>
Unless you have stylesheets completely
disabled, it looks like you’re using
Internet Explorer <span class=”ie5”>5, 5.2 or
5.5</span><span class=”ie6”>6</span>.
If you can, you’d be <span class=”ie5”>slightly
better off upgrading to Internet
Explorer 6, and </span>
<b>much</b> better off ditching
IE completely and using
<a href=”http://mozilla.org”>a
different browser entirely</a>.
</p>
Someone else might want to take this snippet and provide a few more useful links, but don’t forget the “if you can”, because some poor fools don’t have a choice.
Posted on February 24, 2004 06:35 PM | #
19. Michael Earls said:
I’ll break the trend and say just how awesome IE is. Not everything is going to work the way you want it to. The browser specs are very vague in many areas, hence the differing implementations. I will say that I can understand your pain, but I normally say this to people who want to argue the “browser war rhetoric”, IE is a business application platform first, browser second.
But, as you will never convince me to stop using it (until it finally does go away), I’ll never convince you to like it (I can sense a deeper loathing for the creators of the browser in many of these posts).
I’m reading this site in IE now and it looks great. Good job. But I question the importance of many of the eye candy bits you’ve got.
The web browser isn’t intended to provide you with a publishing mechanism. CSS can only do so much. Perhaps you should consider using Flash or PDF to ensure correct rendering of your typographically advanced website.
Just my two cents.
Posted on February 25, 2004 03:19 AM | #
20. Tony said:
What eye candy are you talking about Michael? And what “typographically advanced” aspects are you referring to? What is being talked about here are standard problems.
IE doesn’t obey the W3C rules.
That’s the long and the short of it. PDF or Flash are non-accessible. They’re not markup. They aren’t what the web is supposed to be.
Also, if IE is a business application platform first, broswer second, why did they spend so much time and effort in crushing the life out of Netscape?
Posted on February 25, 2004 04:20 AM | #
21. RichardPW said:
You can use IE’s conditional comments to send your message thus:
<!–[if IE]>Get a proper browser!!<![endif]–>
However, I’m not sure of the merit - most users don’t know what a browser is, and think their computer runs Windows 97 (read Office). Once they’ve got a pop-up blocker (with XP SP2 or just the Google toolbar), you haven’t got much hope of them changing browsers, as the other selling points of alternative browsers are generally more useful to advanced users (tabbed browsing, etc.)
Let’s face it, IE is going to be around for a long while. And hey, it’s just a browser - it’s not like it’s a threat to world peace! What’s more, all thse hours spend hacking to make a site work in IE are, after all, billable hours!
Posted on February 25, 2004 04:39 AM | #
22. Mark Wubben said:
Yesterday I ran into the IE Factor while developing a JavaScript program. Even though I managed to create a work around, it really annoyed me.
This problem did help me, however, to form my opinion on IE more clearly: The one good point of IE is that it’s pre-installed. That’s the problem.
P.S. Don’t say I’m exaggerating, it doesn’t feel like that to me ;-)
Posted on February 25, 2004 05:29 AM | #
23. Lukasz said:
This *may* be a bit sarcastic, but aren’t you, Keith, complaining about IE due to the fact that it does not render your page correctly?
I myself am pretty fed up with this crappy software. But it seems to me that all this anti-IE campaign is little birdie squeek in a center of Manhattan - surely it is nice but remains barely noticeable. More than 90% of internauts use IE - shall we neglect them?
Posted on February 25, 2004 06:01 AM | #
24. Jerry said:
What we need is an IE filter. A de-standardizer which gets invoked when an IE browser accesses an otherwise standardized page.
Preferably this would be something that could live on the web server (apache/php/python plugin). Or maybe it’s a clever activex that slaps IE around during render time.
The beauty of this (if it is even remotely possible) would be that the effort of making IE happy would be done once, in the filter, rather than thousands and thousands of times by web developers.
Just a dream…
Posted on February 25, 2004 06:57 AM | #
25. Michael Czepiel said:
“The web browser isn’t intended to provide you with a publishing mechanism. CSS can only do so much. Perhaps you should consider using Flash or PDF to ensure correct rendering of your typographically advanced website.”
Not troll or pick on you in particular as you’re being very honest against some intimidating opposition here. The point that IE is omnipresent and well taken and I wouldn’t want to force anybody to use IE were it not for the fact that IE is holding back the internet. By not continuing standalone support the only way people will ever see an update is if they actually buy the next rendition of Windows. As you mentioned the internet is not for publishing, I’d argue it is now especially because of CSS, PNG, and eventually SVG/whatever else. CSS alone is capable of doing wondrous things today, provided the browser supports the standard.
As also mentioned PDF and flash are not accessible mediums.
Now, the real problem is IE’s market-share. Obviously, if didn’t hold the sway it did we’d never give it a second thought. Letting that dictate our designs as frivolous as they may be is to stifle creativity and just be plain annoying. Now I’m not sure how the w3c came to power off the top of my head right now, but they’re there thankfully. I’d normally agree that standards should be set by the majority even if it meant overriding their authority as democracy is usually not a bad thing. However, to let a single corporation dictate standards is just wrong unless they are opened up to the public.
Most sites require great lengths and sacrifices to be displayed well in IE. Obviously these compromises must be made due to the populace mindlessly using IE. As a designer it’s reached the point where an inordinate amount of time is spent on fixing otherwise valid designs to work in IE. Time that is unproductive and could easily be used elsewhere.
And yes it does seem that there is little to no hope. But grassroots campaigns have a way of taking off. Even if each one of us converts a single friend, they can always go on and convert others.
Posted on February 25, 2004 08:13 AM | #
26. Eric TF Bat said:
Incidentally, until I started using Mozilla I also thought the anti-IE bias was a storm in a teacup, but I’ve realised the truth of the mantra:
If it doesn’t work in Mozilla, you’ve done it wrong.
If it doesn’t work in IE, IE has done it wrong.
The proof is that it’s almost infinitely easier to develop a page completely in Moz and then apply the _properties and * html selectors to make it work in IE (and in /*\*/ IE Mac /* */ of course) afterwards. Writing in IE first leads you down many, many garden paths; it’s nasty.
There’s no excuse to use IE. Even a lot of the bloggers I see writing from Redmond campus are using Moz nowadays. Just Say No, people.
Posted on February 25, 2004 03:22 PM | #
27. jmmygoggle said:
Why isn’t some activist hacker-type pounding away to create an Outlook or MS-related virus that secretly installs mozilla (or some other suitable alternative) as the default browser? Defusing Exploder requires drastic measures.
Posted on February 25, 2004 05:16 PM | #
28. Michael Heilemann said:
“The web browser isn’t intended to provide you with a publishing mechanism. CSS can only do so much. Perhaps you should consider using Flash or PDF to ensure correct rendering of your typographically advanced website.”
Ohhh, so - much - to - say.
Posted on February 26, 2004 02:41 AM | #
29. Aaron Schaefer said:
I’ve had a similar experience to Scrivs…
“I have been working on a layout it took me a good number of hours (hell maybe days) to fix somes small little spacing issues.”
When I first started designing my new website in November, I decided to try a few different layout techniques (floats, absolutely no use of px, etc.). It took a good week or two to churn out the basic design layout, and it looked pretty good in Firebird. But afterward, it took MASSIVE amounts of time to go back and tweak absolutely all of my positioning code to appear consistent in IE. It’s very frustrating, and inconsistent.
The way things stand now, all the CSS is valid code, but might not be as logical or straight foward than if I was able to just design for standards-based browsers. I’m trying not to “hack” anything, but I figure if my webpage works well in modern browsers, and at least looks recognizable in IE, then that’s good enough for the time being.
Posted on February 26, 2004 08:35 AM | #
30. huphtur said:
IE is like smoking. Everybody knows its bad for you, but its hard to convince people to quit. I quit cold turkey.
Posted on February 26, 2004 03:03 PM | #
31. Keith said:
Just an update for anyone who is still following this. Using the IE child selector hack I was able to hide the padding I use on my Almost Wordless photos from IE. This seemed to fix IE’s problem with my pages.
This was the first hack I’ve had to use on this site. I felt it was justified in that I came damn close to hiding the images completely from IE. This way, they get those images, only without the style.
IE users – count yourself lucky!
Or not, my photos aren’t all that great. ;)
Posted on February 26, 2004 03:37 PM | #
32. Stark said:
Alright I’m pissed at IE. I use linux and mozilla…so when I went to take a look at how my page rendered in IE…I about shit myself. My CSS was all fukked up even though it followed the standard. The whole reason I went to CSS is because IE kept fukking up my tables so I decided to switch. Alotta good it did me. I think I’m worse off than before. :S
PS: Fukkkkk the dammmmm censor on this site!
Posted on February 27, 2004 06:41 PM | #
33. Keith said:
Stark, I was tempted to delete both of your comments. But I think I’ll leave one, just as an example.
The censor is there to keep comment spammers from ruining my site with spam, it’s a bit harsh, but better than a shit-load of spam. Don’t like it? To damn bad. Commenting here is a privilege that can be revoked, show a bit of respect watch what you say.
As far as your problems with IE – welcome to the club bro.
Posted on February 27, 2004 08:07 PM | #
34. Bruce said:
Come on. IE is better than Mozilla. Yes, IE has horrible support for Web standards, but Mozilla has a lot of bugs. According to me, these bugs are more serious problem than limited support. And, you know, you have to support IE, because your customers can kill you, if they don’t see their site on IE. Can you say to them “I do not support IE”?
Posted on February 28, 2004 01:47 PM | #
35. Michael Earls said:
Great comments. Very valid responses to my original comments. “PDF and Flash are not acceptable”. Understood.
This is all starting to look a lot like it did back in 95 when NCSA Mosaic was replaced by Netscape. Alomg came IE 2.0 (which totally sucked). IE 3 beat the pants off of Netscape, but Microsoft was too pushy with the ActiveX thing, and no one jumped on board because they hated the big corporate goons.
Anyway, here we are, with people complaining about “standards”. It’s funny.
Someone mentioned SVG. Did you know that since IE 5.5 there has been another Vector Graphics enginge in IE? It’s called VML, and as with ActiveX, the “everybody but Microsoft” crowd didn’t like it because it was “limiting”. Nevermind that it WORKED and that it would have been very easy to provide support for it in the browser. So they created a “standard” that no one has yet implemented in the browser itself. Instead, you must have a plugin to see this stuff. Again, another unacceptable solution.
I have read every comment on this thread and I can totally understand your pain. I also write software for a major website and there is so much garbage I wish I didn’t have to do to support all the browsers. But honestly, you guys ARE a minority and businesses just can’t justify spending mountains of money to support browsers that were born of angst and frustration.
It’s about the mighty dollar in the end.
However, I am an artist at heart and I sold out to the corporate monkeys a long time ago. My new house, camper van, medical insurance, and regular (non Ramen) eating habits won out over my desire to be an anti-establishment activist.
You might have differing opinions (and I hope you do for the sake of the artistic side of mankind that is being crushed by the dry business world), but I find IE to be the absolute best solution for all of my application problems.
None of my problems live in the Linux space, I should add, so my opinions are limited in scope to the Microsoft platform. Take that for what you will, but I tried (for a year) making Linux solve my problems with Apache, Java, PHP, mySQL, and others and I constantly found myself limited with what I could do thinking “I should implement that awesome toolset that I’m used to using in Visual Studio”. Then I realized that I was reinventing things that Microsoft had already created.
(http://www.cerkit.com/cerkitBlog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=6c737b3f-20f5-4c12-b2c4-540ce913f98f)
Anyway, this forum is not a place for old Microsoft platform programming farts to convince you of anything, it’s a place where you can share your pains with your “brothers and sisters” and start the grass-roots efforts to clean up the web. Perhaps you should aim to work for Microsoft and fix IE yourselves. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Then, the source would be open to you. :)
I hope you succeed and I wish you luck.
Posted on March 7, 2004 07:16 AM | #
36. Doug said:
You want an IE ‘filter’? Check out
http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/
its a work in progress, but looks damn amazing. If it works for you, I suggest you click his donate link - I will as soon as he does position:fixed!
Posted on March 8, 2004 02:23 PM | #
37. Steve said:
As I enter in my 2¢ worth here, I am using Opera as a web browser. I have been using browsers since I started with Mosaic years ago. I must say that I am a fairly strong Microsoft basher as they meticulously eat everything that gets in their way and then poop out mediocre software for the easily impressed masses. I cringe at every direction that Microsoft decides is “where we WANT to go today”. However, that being said, it is time for me to bring up the one and only, single, sole, solitary, exclusive, all by itself reason that MSIE is my first choice in browser. SEARCH.
I absolutely cannot live without the far supreme and simplistic method of putting Google in the left side and searching to where I can click and read as fast as I can think. With cable speeds I can search through about 5 or 6 pages in less than 10 seconds. NO OTHER BROWSER CAN TOUCH THIS! I wrote to Netscape years ago about having them incorporate the same thing, but they didn’t do it.
I would stick with Opera or one of the others you have mentioned here if they could just create the sites like Microsoft did to enable that type of searching. I click search on and off constantly and probably use searches 90% of the time I am on the Internet.
That ONE concern has put me in the MSIE using group for probably 5 years now. I wish I could quit MSIE, but I can’t just because of that!
Posted on March 12, 2004 06:27 PM | #
38. Garrett Dimon said:
I don’t know if I’m just a realist, but dealing with browser differences is the nature of the business. IE is by far the worst, but every browser has some problems.
I honestly can’t think of a time that I built a site and only had problems with IE. There’s Opera, Safara 1.1 & 1.2, Mozilla(and related), IE for Mac, IE 5.0-6.0, and more.
If a browser has 95% market share, it is the de facto standard whether we like it or not. This will change in time. Either Microsoft will improve it, or it will get beat out, but until then, it is the standard whether we like it or not. And the knowledge of the resulting intricacies and quirks, folks, is how we make a living.
Posted on March 23, 2004 03:24 PM | #
39. John Sterling said:
I can’t understand what all the talk about IE is - Netscape is by far the worst browser to design for on the market today. It is the quirkiest and the slowest by far. I can’t tell you how many hours have been spent making something work in Netscape that works fine in all other browsers.
I don’t like Microsoft much either but IE is one of the few products that is done right.
Posted on April 6, 2004 08:52 PM | #
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