I recently prototyped a site using CSS that only Safari 3+ and FireFox 3+ could understand. I never loaded IE up once while doing it. Boy was it a pleasure being able to have a CSS stylesheet declare rounded borders with one declaration. The problem with supporting IE at all is that so few (almost none) of the CSS functionality that eliminates hacks we've been working with are available. Even IE8 isn't enough. So choosing to support IE at all means intentionally refusing to adopt features supported by Safari and FireFox. That is, <i>unless</i> you want an inconsistent experience for your users.<p>But why do we have to provide a perfectly consistent experience between desktop browsers?I'm starting to think that this is precisely what we should do to force MS to get with the times. Let your site degrade for IE in ways that do not break core functionality or fundamental design requirements. When users start figuring out that they can't see a prettier version of NYTimes because IE doesn't support @font-face, rounded corners, CSS transformations, and other advanced CSS functionality, many will decide to switch.<p>The difference between this approach now and how it was implemented in the 90s during the Netscape/IE wars, is that it's a best practice to degrade gracefully but retain important functionality now. The criticism of this strategy back then is that many sites simply did not work at all in one browser or the other. That would be unacceptable.
Anti-trust had no teeth last decade because of the 'privatization is good, private enterprise can do no wrong' economic orgy that just came crashing down, and as a result IE has held the internet back a decade. Just THINK of where we would be if Netscape had won.<p>The political climate has shifted in the wake of the housing crisis, so... could a <i>class action suit</i> have some teeth? Think of all the money lost in fixing IE-specific bugs that only exist because Microsoft used its monopoly to shove an inferior browser onto every desktop, and then refused to put resources into developing it, to ensure they continued to make money on rich client applications and their operating system. Think of the cumulative cost of fixing IE bugs across our entire economy.<p>Microsoft owes the American people billions for IE. I want a class action suit against them. There are IE-specific bug billing records that surely amount to billions of dollars at companies across America. Companies would line up with invoices to web developers to join the suit.<p>Microsoft owes us all money. They must be stopped, and they must pay.
Subsequent versions of IE have gotten dramatically better, but the time delta between versions is too long. From its wikipedia page:<p><pre><code> IE5: September 1997
IE6: August 2001 (+4 years)
IE7: October 2006 (+9 years)
IE8: March 2009 (+11.5 years)
</code></pre>
Safari, Firefox, et al do not have a similar lag and have been able to implement newer standards much more quickly. WebKit, for example, is in active development, and the version of the framework in use by Safari is updated fairly regularly.
How depressing. I think we all knew this deep down, but he puts it very eloquently. IE will always be holding the web back, at least for the <i>entire forseeable future</i>. Even as a lifelong cynic, this still bummed me out.
I wouldn't be surprised if IE6 outlasted IE7 as all the people who could upgrade from IE6 (not locked down corporate machines that need to access outdated intranet sites) have no reason to stay on IE7 either.<p>In that respect I think and hope he's wrong. If anyone's writing internal business apps today that will only ever work on one version of one browser then they should be taken out and shot.
It does, albeit too slow. According to our ranking site <a href="http://ranking.lt/" rel="nofollow">http://ranking.lt/</a> IE share felt below 50% for the first time. One should have in mind, that this is not stats from some geek/webdev site, but collected by online advertising company, so it is even more likely that the stats are skewed in favor of IE.
I don't really agree with this assessment. With the release of IE8, we also saw the browser upgrade coming through automatic windows updates. IE will eventually probably accept this as much as safari and firefox, thereby keeping most users up to speed.
you should support IE6 as a separate product, and via a separate feature timeline.<p>if you can launch a web app for browsers that are modern and relevant in 4 weeks, and doing it for IE takes an additional 2-4 weeks, why wait to launch those features for a broken browsers, support and reward users with current browsers by giving them 1st access to new features.<p>supporting IE6 on a different roadmap means you can do ROI on each feature, and if IE6 is to expensive to develop a feature for, then...... gasp... you can just skip it.