I don’t usually like to use my blog to rant. I’m much more interested in offering constructive criticism if I’m to criticize at all. But every so often there will be an issue that pops up that really gets my back up and it’s usually when I see an injustice that is going uncorrected. This is how I’m feeling over Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE).
Before I begin I admit that I do use Microsoft products (just not IE) and, for the most part, I’m quite happy. Microsoft has done a lot of good in the world but when it comes to the web browser the battle between IE and the rest of the browser world is costing us all. Consider the following . . .
In any web browser is the capability to view the source code of the page that you are viewing. Now, most of us would never really want to look at this but if you did and you knew a little bit about website code you would see one very common piece of code handling. In almost every case, a web developer has had to insert code that checks to see which browser you are using and, in almost every case, they are looking for IE. The reason? Because IE will not display a website the same as every other browser so special code needs to be written to handle IE browsers (I say “browsers” purposefully as there are even differences between IE versions . . . more on this later). There are a multitude of reasons why this happens but essentially, IE is a non-standard browser wherein almost every other browser is (I’ll leave it to those with a more intimate understanding of the technology to explain how we got here since I have a different point to make here!).
Due to IE’s prominence on a Windows based machine, most people will simply click the “e” button and launch IE when they want to browse the web without a thought to installing something else. Consiquently, as long as Windows continues to be the predominant operating system IE will continue to be the browser most people use. Notwithstanding increases in Apple and Linux market share, we are still stuck with IE for the next while and thus an ongoing need to accommodate its proprietary annoyances.
The big issue I have is that accommodating IE costs me money. If a project is going to cost me ‘X‘ dollars, a certain percentage of this will be additional programming costs for IE. Even worse, any major release of IE (based on past experience) is likely to lead to additional programming costs to “fix” code that was already stable in all previous versions. I tend not to have this problem with any other browser upgrades.
Now, arguments can be made as to how we got to this point and Microsoft could argue that they have a better technology and everyone should adopt their way of doing things, bla, bla, bla . . . but the fact is that if it’s costing me money to adapt to the quirks of IE then it’s costing everyone else too. And it’s not like it’s a cost that we pay that Microsoft can even benefit from. That additional expense is pure overhead and does not flow to Microsoft. It goes to simply making our industry less efficient.
What to do about it? Well, the thought of a class-action lawsuit crossed my mind but perhaps the best solution is to encourage your friends, family and co-workers to switch browsers to anything other than IE. Resist the IE temptation . . . I know, it’s so enticing just sitting there waiting for you to click away but don’t do it! Download Firefox, Chrome, or Safari all great browsers (note you’ll have to start IE to download them but you’ll only have to do it once!!) and vote with your browsing! And don’t get me started on the Flash on iPhone/iPad thing!!!
