Submitted by “It’s common knowledge that almost every single geek hates Internet Explorer with a passion, but have you ever wondered why? Let’s take a fair look at the history and where it all began… For posterity, if nothing else. Contrary to what you might think, this article is not meant to be a hate-fest on Internet Explorer – in fact, we’re pretty impressed with the hardware acceleration and new features in Internet Explorer 9 – but keep reading for the whole story.”
This was a pretty even handed treatment. I wish more tech articles were like this.
http://giveupinternet.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/internet-explo…
I love that pic. I still see it on IE8.
Edited 2010-10-20 23:05 UTC
They are exactly right in what they are saying. I hate the final phase of web site development where you have to view the site in IE6/7 and hack away to get the pages to render correctly, but it is true that stuff like XmlHttpRequest originated in IE and it’s not really received recognition for that.
The main issue is that IE6 is so alive and well today, due to MS’s own anti-piracy measures and corporate sloth.
IE8 has some idiotic flaws (regressions from 6/7) but mostly renders pages almost the same as Firefox and Webkit.
Edited 2010-10-20 23:04 UTC
They completely forgot the part of by the time IE9 gets a big part of the market share, it will already be old.
So it would be like IE6 is now.
In the mean time, we have an other browser we need to test with. Next to IE6, IE7, IE8 we also now have IE9.
Also, when IE9 will come out, it will probably be the last to be released of all the new browsers. It will also only support some things all the other have. I think we can even say, it will support everything the other browsers already support today.
I’m not quite sure about the last bit … does IE9 support extensions?
Third party extensions? That anyone can download and install for free?
There is no doubt taht IE9 is a great improvement over IE6, IE7 and IE8, and that is to be applauded, but as far as I can tell IE9 will still be some way behind the capabilities of Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Safari et al.
Edited 2010-10-21 05:48 UTC
Without looking up the fact I think I can tell IE does support extensions.
If I go to people’s houses to fix there computer for being too slow; I see that they’ve installed I great variety of handy ‘toolbars’. Take for example the toolbar that let’s you buy smilies easily and also let’s you see the companies latest smily articles trough automatic handy pop-ups. I haven’t found an extension like that for Firefox yet, so I guess I have to go trough the normal channels to get my smily need in the meantime.
Edited 2010-10-21 11:54 UTC
IE has supported extensions, I think since IE5(.5 ?).
But they are not as easy to make, probably most will need Visual Studio and some understanding of VB or C.
While extensions for Firefox can be made by any webdeveloper.
That is why there are many more extensions for Firefox.
No one who has worked extensively with IE6 would make that statement.
There will never be anything like IE6.
Nothing will ever compare to that abomination.
I’m serious, IE9 is already behind and hasn’t been released yet and it will not be installed over IE8 on most IE8 installations (because it will not be released for XP).
OK, IE6 didn’t even understand the boxmodel, I’ll give you that.
Can’t we just put a little poison in Winxp’s milk? It doesn’t have to suffer but it _has_ to go away.
It would be so much easier if Windows XP was the problem, it’s those stupid idiots who still need IE6 in some kind of corporate environment (possibly even still running Windows 2000 ?).
IE6 is not alive because of MS. IE7 only required WGA initially. Pirates were also never prevented from running Firefox.
Lame cheapskate companies keep IE6 alive. It is under 4% in NA and a lot of websites can ignore it since their paying customers are using something else.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-na-monthly-200909-201009
Edited 2010-10-21 00:09 UTC
It varies widely, it very much depends on the target audience.
So true …
It wasn’t that bad. It was actually pretty cool when it was released. I preferred it to IE4 for browsing. But by the time Ie 5 came out, there wasn’t a Netscape 5. And What was 4 then ( 4.6 something) was worse than 4. 0 was in terms of stability and speed. The first wave of browser wars were over that day.
Spot on. Netscape 4 was never hated the way IE4/5/6 are hated. By about 2000 the 4.x series was showing its age and was often a pain to support seamlessly with IE, but if the market shares had been reversed people would have said the same about IE5 at the time. The fact was at that time the two major browsers were different enough you had to put in real effort to support both equally.
For me there “were” reasons to hate IE (including IE8)
First, js is very very slow on it. The rest of the world did something about js speed, but not MS, well until now. I use js extensively. For a lot of things, the speed of js doesn’t really matter until you start to do some heaving lifting with it. I have had a lot of fun with Raphael recently, but not when using IE (does’t work at all in the IE9 beta, well, last time I checked).
Second, and as has been pointed out time and time again, things just don’t render like they do in Webkit and Gecko. I rarely have to do anything to get things to work in those engines, but still have a lot of issues with IE.
Having said that, it’s very good to see that MS is “fixing” IE. I truly hope they keep the momentum going and give us a browser that sticks to “standards”.
As for XMLHttpRequest, yes, that was a great idea.
On the Mac I love Safari, esp. the debugging tools (very nice).
On the PC (Win and Lin) I love Firefox.
I am not sure why, but I haven’t clicked with Chrome just yet, but I am sure that will change.
I really want to like Opera too, but that’s not gonna happen anytime soon…
My hatred for IE stems from a few somewhat related things.
Once IE suffocated all competition through illegal methods and reached complete monopoly status, Microsoft left it to rot. No updates–it was frozen in time. Meanwhile, the entire Web basically stalled thanks to Microsoft, and around this time IE’s gazillions of flaws began getting increasingly exploited. This got worse, to the point you could barely even use the damn browser without getting dozens of popups and–even worse–malware. The only thing that got the Web going again was Firefox, which had the benefit of also improving the overall security of Windows since Microsoft was too lazy to get their fat asses off their $$$ cushions. Who knows where we would be without Mozilla, but one thing is sure: it wouldn’t be very pretty.
After all the trouble Microsoft caused the entire Web with IE, I still think very lowly of it, and couldn’t recommend ANYONE to use it. I haven’t since Phoenix–with the exception of Windows Update, which in XP required IE. I despise IE.
I think you’re over doing it a little on their agreements with OEM’s – yes Internet Explorer was pre-loaded on Windows machines but even when that was happening people were still downloading and installing Netscape Navigator/Communicator. People moved to Internet Explorer because by the time version 5 was released Netscape gained the moniker by many geeks as ‘Nutscrape’ because it was that horrible. I remember running it on Windows and it crashed all the time – sitting there praying and hoping that the Java Applet wasn’t going to bring down the whole browser.
The problem is that Microsoft knew once they gained market share thanks to inertia by so many people they would have to do something horrendously stupid that would make people move away from it. How many people do you hear moan about their bank, ISP, insurance company or some other entity and yet don’t move? Its very easy to win market share but it takes a long time to lose it. Netscape used to have the market by the short and curlies but thanks to 2-3 crap releases one after another Microsoft gained more market share.
In closing, until people are willing to move when a company fails to produce the goods the parent company will keep doing the least amount possible. Microsoft knew they could get away with neglecting Internet Explorer because of this inertia that so many customers have – their reluctance to be willing to make a move from one browser to another.
I guess you weren’t there in 1996 when Internet Explorer was vastly superior to a other web brower and that we weren’t so dependent on javascript.
Neither is the web, Microsoft was kinda forced into it, but on the long run they knew that it was removing the requirement of using windows as a desktop platform (how many of you are using windows, and among you how many are using outlook ?).
Web application are rising thanks to a lot to humm … Google whose money is on being on the web gathering data from any source available, and showing you ads. Microsoft want developer to use their tools/api/runtime (as much as Apple), so you would be “forced” to have a windows OS to develop and use application, and microsoft is(was?) doing a damn fine at that (mdsn documentation is excellent, the .Net runtime is a pretty good rip-off of the JVM, and DirectX/XNA surely makes game development a breeze on general purpose computers).
When it came out Internet explorer 4 was pretty good at one thing, rendering broken HTML code (where netscape would handle them quite badly ), and hence spew a generation of broken html that was ok with IE but not with netscape. And of course the “free” argument was absolutely compelling too at that time.
And I guess apple got a pretty sweet deal in bundling IE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJqSaQj8iX4 (**don’t watch it your brain might explode**).
One big problem IE wasn’t designed for the web at all, Microsoft was forced into it because of the intranet boom, hence IE worked pretty well in those sandboxed enterprise environment. The web is totally another beast and an ugly one (myspace or goatse anyone).
That pretty much follows my usage pattern. The initial releases definitely were immature in many respects, but quickly surpassed NetScape. Then Firefox came along and made us all realize how crappy IE had become after beating out NetScape. IE 8 was the only version since those early ones that I didn’t go out of my way to avoid. It wasn’t my go-to browser, but often was my default one that other apps would open links with since compatibility was less of an issue with IE versus the others. IE 9 sounds like it could move past tolerable and actually be a daily browser…
I have worked in the company, that bought a very big and complicated system to do business and organize stuff. The frontend was a WEB page. But the developer company, that programmed it made the frontend IE6 specific. So none of other browsers showed it correctly. I remember some updates slipped through domain policy and some users got IE7. They could not work anymore. So the written document has been released, that said, that no other browser should be allowed, than IE6 and all new computers must ship with XP.
The developers said, that to make that WEB app cross browser compatible, you need to pay enormous load of money.
So till today they are forced to use IE6 and XP.
There were some web projects, that I have done for that company. It was a nightmare to convince people, that the my webpage is good, but the old browser simply doesn’t show it correctly.
And this is, why IE6 doesn’t die…
Unfortunately there is a whole generation of people in charge of organisations who believe that IT is about writing something once then walking away believing it’ll take care of itself. Information Technology is a continuous cycle of upgrading and refinement – it is never static but far too many can’t get their head around that concept. It is amazing though that they can get their head around the idea of upgrading equipment in a factory but for some reason because ‘code’ isn’t a physical thing they can touch then obvious it can’t go out of date
There is so much epic fail in the business world its enough to make anyone want to go and live in an Amish community and not have to deal with such stupidity.
The article shouldn’t claim that “the mess is over”. The IE9 beta still failed to render any of my work properly, while I like to think I write pretty decent cross-browser code. Stripping out all my pre-IE9 hacks didn’t help; I had to resort to yet another set of exceptions for IE9. Make no mistake: the browser’s standard support is still lacking, and while the team have made great strides, IE9 still means just another wonky rendering engine to support.
My experience is similar. Still, it’s not as bad as supporting IE6 (if only I could also *stop* supporting IE6!) and at least we have some good mechanisms for feeding different style to IE9.
I have been using html5boilerplate from http://html5boilerplate.com/ and loving it.
Since using it, I have only had to use minor hacks in my CSS (double margin) to make (HTML5) pages render properly in all browsers IE6 and newer. (I test in IE6-8, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera)
I never thought I would see the day, but I have! I still hate IE for all of my previous years hacking, but now that someone has rolled most of the hacks into a simple to use package, I don’t mind it so much any more.
They did everything they could once they realized where the web was going to use IE to kill the internet, do you really think we’d love them for it?
–bornagainpenguin