As a web design agency, we, on a daily basis, have to deal with the monopoly that IE holds over most businesses. The same goes for other web design agencies, even if they specialise in .NET programming.
Now, looking at the web as an ever-evolving entity that cannot be caged, or restricted, at least not in a worldwide manner, it’s hard to believe that people with so much knowledge, influence and funding, would produce a browser that is so outdated that it is the single focus of such bewilderment and annoyance from most, if not all web developers.
To give you a better understanding of the environment; the old inner workings of web design agencies was that the designers would create layouts, pass it to the developers who would explain the boundaries that browsers have, and require alterations to the design. Eventually an agreement was made and the developers would then code up the site, checking it works in all browsers of the day.
Nowadays browsers are much more advanced, varied and numerous. The most popular being Internet Explorer (IE), followed by Firefox, Safari and more. This allows designers to be a lot freer with their work, less to and fro between designers and developers, and better results all round. With all the shiny features and capabilities, modern browsers should be a dream to code for right?
Wrong. There is a hellish little cousin that’s supposed to come around for major family events, but seems to be there all the time, who you just want to go away in some horrible accident, preferably initiated by you. That little hellboy is Microsoft’s IE (all of them). There have been many reports of IE6 being the worst of all, not conforming to coding standards accepted by literally every other browser, being completely incapable of dealing with image file formats like png, the list goes on.
Lets put it this way; if you purchase a new computer, you find there is a bunch of preloaded software on there right? This mainly applies to Windows rather than Mac and Linux. So you are not very likely to actually use much of this software, and those damn pop up messages in the bottom right corner asking you to update them all the time is enough to drive you to drink! So you decide to ditch them and clean out your system. Think about this, one of those is IE. Free software, as all browsers should be, but why choose the one that was preloaded? You have just spent time removing all that junk that was preloaded right so ditch that one too! Get yourself a shiny new browser, one that can cope with the whole Internet.
The main problem is businesses that purchase a bunch of computers, set up their intranet and whatnot, put a block on their systems so their employees cannot download from the Internet. Now this is a great idea, because who knows what people will do. But unfortunately this means that these computers are stuck with whatever browser was preloaded, and yes you guessed it, Internet Explorer. Dammit! The secondary problem is that people are just ignorant to the flaws in IE. They choose IE because its there and if there is an issue with a site, they simply say, “well that’s a crap site, can’t even see the imaged properly!” Now this is partly true, a good web development agency should be able to cope with IE, but that doesn’t mean they have to, there’s an alternative…
I enjoyed reading an article titled; “It’s time to bring down IE6” in a web magazine. I think it’s time to bring down all IE browsers. They bring out new versions claiming they are more web friendly, cope with all sorts of eventualities, but it’s just not true. The same goes for their operating system, but that’s another story for another day.
IE is the thorn in our industry’s foot that can be removed if we work together to teach users that there are far better alternatives. Now this may involve sites that purposefully redirect any wayward browser using IE to an alternative browser download page. Very sneaky, and potentially detrimental to the website, but worth the sacrifice for the big picture? Who knows?
