When Will IE Get It?
I’m sick and tired of having to design a website more than once every time I make one. Anyone who designs websites knows what I am talking about. You design it to W3 standards, which works for every modern browser like Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, and then you go back and make it work as well as you possibly can in Internet Explorer.
Even though Microsoft has released version 8 and is developing version 9, they are notorious for having their own standards for the web all the way back to the first release of Explorer. They are fairly capricious about which parts of CSS IE respects, and instead insist upon using their own set of “filter” commands to complete a small subset of what CSS can do.
Because it is the default install browser for Windows, it commands a large market share. The statistics on my websites show that IE users account for between 40 and 70% of my traffic. So I can’t dismiss it, as much as I would like to. But anyone who is reading this site, or is even slightly technically inclined, knows that their internet experience will be enhanced by using any other browser. Even my 90-year old stepfather surfs the web with Firefox.
But Microsoft doesn’t get this and continues to ram a substandard user experience down our collective throats, and as consumers and designers, we are all left frustrated and under-served. Who exactly is Microsoft serving by having a browser that doesn’t take advantage of the newest and best features the web has to offer?
I just redesigned my professional site, relying heavily on CSS3 to make it load more quickly and render uniformly across modern browsers. It uses CSS to round corners, create gradients and make drop shadows. Guess what? Even the newest version of Internet Explorer can’t process any of that. So people who visit my site get an adequate experience in IE- the corners are square, there are no gradients or drop shadows. The site works but it’s lacking the features I included to make it special and interesting.
By not including the ability to render these simple features of current CSS, designers like myself lack incentive to develop sites that include features for Internet Explorer. For many sites, IE is no longer the most commonly used browser. Many organizations counsel against using it for security reasons. Fortunately, many large companies have finally started phasing out the aged and decrepit IE6, which, surprisingly, persists to this day, despite first being released in 2001.
The internet is a huge place and having to code sites more than once to make them work with all browsers is not an efficient way to work or to court clientele. Microsoft is used to being big and having their own way and overpowering competition to get their way. But now that the world wide web has been around long enough that people have embraced its potential and explored what it can truly do, people aren’t content to settle for the third-rate experience that Microsoft is pushing with their browser.
I really should go and add the specific “filter” code to my site that would make the bits that look so cool in modern browsers look cool in IE too, but, honestly I don’t really care enough to bother. If someone thinks that IE provides an adequate browsing experience, then they get an adequate version of my site with it. But if you want full richness that is available on the web these days, you’re not going to get it via Internet Explorer.
