It’s time to stop blaming Internet Explorer

Posted at July 11, 2012 11:41 am by Nicholas C. Zakas

Tags: Browsers, Internet Explorer, Progressive Enhancement

A couple of days ago, Smashing Magazine published an article entitled, Old Browsers Are Holding Back The Web^[1]. The author of this article that “old browsers” are holding web developers back from creating beautiful experiences. Old browsers, in this case, apparently referred to Internet Explorer version 6-9. That’s right, the author groups Internet Explorer 9 into the same group as Internet Explorer 6. He goes on to list some of the things that you can’t use in Internet Explorer 8 and 9. You can read the rest of the article yourself to get the details.

Articles like this frustrate me a lot. For most of my career, I’ve fought hard against the “woe is me” attitude embraced by so many in web development and articulated in the Smashing Magazine article. This attitude is completely counterproductive and frequently inaccurately described. Everyone was complaining when Internet Explorer 6 had a 90%+ marketshare. That share has shrunk to 6.3% today^[2] globally (though the article cites a much smaller number, 0.66%, which is true in the United States). Microsoft even kicked off a campaign to encourage people to upgrade.

I can understand complaining about Internet Explorer 6 and even 7. We had them for a long time, they were a source of frustration, and I get that. I would still never let anyone that I worked with get too buried in complaining about them. If it’s our job to support those browsers then that’s just part of our job. Every job has some part of it that sucks. Even at my favorite job, as front end lead on the Yahoo homepage, there were still parts of my job that sucked. You just need to focus on the good parts so you can tolerate the bad ones. Welcome to life.

But then the article goes on to bemoan the fact that so many people use Internet Explorer 8 and that Internet Explorer 9 is gaining market share. Are you kidding me? First and foremost, I would much rather support Internet Explorer 8 then I would 6 and 7. Microsoft forcing most people to upgrade from 6 and 7 to 8 is an incredible move and undoubtedly a blessing. Internet Explorer 8 isn’t perfect, but it’s a nice, stable browser.

Internet Explorer 9, on the other hand, is a damn good browser. The only reason it doesn’t have all of the features as Chrome and Firefox is because they rebuilt the thing from scratch so that adding more features in the future would be easier. Let me say that again: they rebuilt the browser from scratch. They necessarily had to decide what were the most important features to get in so that they could release something and start getting people to upgrade from version 8. If they had waited for feature parity with Chrome or Firefox, we probably still wouldn’t have Internet Explorer 9.

The constant drumming of “Internet Explorer X is the new Internet Explorer 6″ is getting very old. Microsoft has done a lot to try to correct their past transgressions, and it seems like there are still too many people who aren’t willing to let go of old grudges. There will always be a browser that lags behind others. First it was Mosaic that was lagging behind Netscape. Then it was Netscape lagging behind Internet Explorer. Then it was Internet Explorer lagging behind Firefox. People are already starting to complain about Android 2.x browsers.

What makes the web beautiful is precisely that there are multiple browsers and, if you build things correctly, your sites and applications work in them all. They might not necessarily work exactly the same in them all, but they should still be able to work. There is absolutely nothing preventing you from using new features in your web applications, that’s what progressive enhancement is all about. No one is saying you can’t use RGBA. No one is holding a gun to your head and saying don’t use CSS animations. As an engineer on the web application you get to make decisions every single day.

The author of the Smashing Magazine article very briefly mentions progressive enhancement as a throwaway concept that doesn’t even enter into the equation. Once again, this is indicative of an old attitude of web development that is counterproductive and ultimately lacking in creativity. The reason that I still give talks about progressive enhancement is because it allows you to give the best experience possible to users based on the browser’s capabilities. That’s the way the web was meant to work. I’ve included a video of that talk below in case you haven’t seen it.

It’s not actually old browsers that are holding back the web, it’s old ways of thinking about the web that are holding back the web. Fixating on circumstances that you can’t change isn’t a recipe for success. The number of browsers we have to support, even “old browsers”, just represent constraints to the problems that we have to solve. It is from within constraints that creativity is born^[3]. The web development community has evolved enough that we should stop pointing fingers at Internet Explorer and start taking responsibility for how we do our jobs. Let’s create solutions rather than continually pointing fingers. We are better than that.

Clarification (2012-July-11): I think some people have jumped on my statement about Internet Explorer 8 and missed the larger point of the article. I am not saying that Internet Explorer 8 (or 9!) is on par with Chrome or Firefox. All I am saying is that the constant complaining about Internet Explorer has gotten old. Yes, complaining is useful to get people to listen. Microsoft is listening, so continuing to complain doesn’t do anything except perpetuate an attitude that I would rather not have in web development. Let’s give them a chance to right the ship without retrying them for past transgressions perpetually.

References

Disclaimer: Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this article are those of Nicholas C. Zakas and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employer, my colleagues, Wrox Publishing, O'Reilly Publishing, or anyone else. I speak only for myself, not for them.

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139 Comments

While I appreciate many of your points, my chief disagreement is that IE8 is a ‘nice, stable browser’.

Pete on July 11th, 2012 at 12:11 pm

Actually, ignore my previous comment. I can’t say that I can side with any of this article at all. Only thing I agree with is that IE9 was, indeed, a massive step forward. Everything else is pretty blind to what devs have to go through in the real world.

Pete on July 11th, 2012 at 12:16 pm

@Pete, did you somehow miss the part where Nicholas was the front end lead at Yahoo? Is that not “real world” enough for you?

I have to agree with Nicholas. All this whining about IE is counterproductive and really is getting old.

Bob on July 11th, 2012 at 12:25 pm

I find the main barrier for coding good websites is not the actual technology itself. It’s the clients who insist that websites must look nearly the same for all browsers. I still deal with clients who need IE7 to look 98% like Chrome, thus I have to be careful about what CSS3 tricks I can use to save on requests and loads. It’s frustrating but client education and enlightenment can only go so far, sadly.

Most smaller businesses and clients are looking for shiny and interesting websites, but large businesses and corporations that I’ve dealt with are stuck on old computers with IT professionals who are uninterested in upgrading to OSes past XP, thus forcing us to continue developing for IE7 even if market share for their websites for IE7 is still in the single digit percentages.

I only stopped IE6 support early 2011 for all my clients, even though I still have one clients who wants mediocre support today (since they can’t afford to quickly upgrade from Windows 98). I expect to be forced to support IE7 through mid-2013 if not longer. It’s my sad reality as a front-end coder.

Micah on July 11th, 2012 at 12:36 pm

I agree.
Getting the job done in a cross-browser fashion without moaning about the restrictions the client demands is what gets you payed and it is what seperates the “good” from the ones that “sorta get the job done”.
And don’t forget about innerHTML, XHR and stuff like that which came from IE.
Sure it took way too long get IE back into the innovation flow but there is no way we can change that now, like you accuratly state “welcome to life”.

Imho the “problem” is that some poeple can’t or won’t get into the discussion with clients about the fact that supporting more browsers takes more time and should cost more money.

PM5544 on July 11th, 2012 at 12:53 pm

I have to disagree with you. Even IE10 is behind everyone else’s current browsers with regards to new features and standards compliance. Take a look at When can I use…, a website that lists standards support in current and upcoming browsers. Yes, IE9 is certainly an improvement over IE8, and 10 is an improvement over 9, but every iteration of IE is behind the current versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

Colin on July 11th, 2012 at 12:58 pm

@Pete: You’re part of the reason this whole article was posted. If you can’t do your job like a professional, then find something else to do. My boss would laugh if employees started complaining about doing their job. If your job is web development, and you don’t like browsers, you’ve got a personal issue to deal with!

Jodo on July 11th, 2012 at 12:58 pm

“The web development community has evolved enough that we should stop pointing fingers at Internet Explorer and start taking responsibility for how we do our jobs. Let’s create solutions rather than continually pointing fingers.”

I totally agree. Pointing fingers is very typical to whole IT community, not only frontend developers. I work as a web backend developer and every single day I observe situations when somebody says: “What a horrible part of code, what a lame wrote that?! My code would be better, but if it won’t work it won’t be my fault…”, and so on. I call this ‘delegation of responsibility due to incompetence’.

Nice article by the way, cheers!

Pawel on July 11th, 2012 at 12:59 pm

Amen!

kimblim on July 11th, 2012 at 1:00 pm

Yes, whining about IE got so old for us that we simply decided we weren’t going to support any version of IE that didn’t have a certain set of HTML5, CSS3 and ES6 features implemented. Period.

Want to use our site, then get a modern browser.

Stop whining that your browser won’t render our standards-based web site. Go to Chrome’s website, or Firefox’s web and click the download button. Whew, that was hard, wasn’t it?

Lars on July 11th, 2012 at 1:01 pm

I completely with you and your article was really refreshing. I think people need a villain. It make’s life much simpler if you have someone to blame

Sebastian on July 11th, 2012 at 1:09 pm

@Colin – you’ve completely missed the point of this post. I never argued that Internet Explorer 9 or 10 was on par with anything else. My main argument is that all browsers will not always have the same capabilities, and complaining about the ones of your capabilities doesn’t change that. It’s your job to create a nice, progressively enhanced experience so that everyone gets the benefit of the browser that they’re using.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 11th, 2012 at 1:11 pm

@Micah – again, this is more about creative problem solving than anything else. I still try to make things work in Internet Explorer 7, as well. It’s a good mental exercise to keep you sharp. As for dealing with clients, it’s always a good idea to tell them that dealing with such browsers tends to take more time and therefore will cost more money. Sometimes that’s enough to get them to change their mind.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 11th, 2012 at 1:13 pm

Canvas has been the biggest addition to the web and to be honest IE9 and especially IE10 support it in a way the other browsers are way behind, it just runs so much faster on IE9/IE10 than anything else. It isn’t even close. I will come up with some awesome game code and it runs like butter on IE10 and then I go to test it on Chrome and start to cry. For me everything except IE9 and IE10 are holding back the web.

Jesse on July 11th, 2012 at 1:19 pm

Nicholas, unfortunately I have to say that you’re not grasping the point of the article, and why it (as you say) has a “woe is me” attitude about IE6-9.

First of all, I’m not an IE basher. I’ve published many articles that promote progressive enhancement, and that offer solutions for people who have to support IE. I’ve published an E-Book on how to deal with cross-browser issues, mainly focusing on polyfills and other technique for dealing with IE6-9. And I’ve even written two articles published on SitePoint that were paid by Microsoft, to help promote IE9. Microsoft did not tell me what to write in those articles, I wrote them on my own, discussing all the features of IE9 and its developer tools. I even wrote an article for SM that promoted starting development in the oldest browsers, to ensure code maintainability (i.e. “progressive enhancement”). So it’s clearly not fair for you to label me as an IE basher (although I don’t expect you to know all my work, which is why I’m pointing these things out).

(I would link all of these articles/sources here, but I’m afraid that too many links would trigger your spam filter).

Overall, I think I’ve done my job promoting progressive enhancement and support for IE6-9. It’s ironic that you claim that I’m promoting “old ways of thinking”, when in fact your view here of progressive enhancement is the old way we’ve been doing things. Of course, I’m not opposing your view of PE; I’m simply saying that the article on SM has nothing to do with PE.

The purpose of the article was to show that whatever problems, limitations, constraints, etc. exist in IE versions 6-9, will *still exist in those browsers* in 5 years. In 10 years. In 20 years. And that’s all related to the fact that new versions of IE cannot install on the most widely-used OS, and the fact that those versions of IE do not auto-update and do not notify the user when an update is available.

As I mentioned in my response to your comment, your attitude implies that you would rather support IE8 than not support it (assuming you had the choice). I really can’t figure out why anyone would want to think that way.

Here’s a hypothetical situation for you: As a result of my two articles published on Smashing Magazine this week, IE8 and IE9 usage drops to a combined below 5%. No, this is not going to happen, we both know that. But hypothetically speaking, if that did happen, wouldn’t you say that would be a huge step forward for the web?

If you can’t admit that, then I’m afraid you’re still missing the point, and unfortunately it’s *you* that’s stuck in old ways of thinking, not me.

PS to everyone reading: I don’t hate Nicholas. In fact, I love his work, and I think he’s one of the best developers in the world. This is nothing but friendly debate (I hope). I own his JavaScript book, and have promoted it on my website multiple times. Everyone should own it. I Just think he’s dead wrong in his analysis of the point of my article.

Louis on July 11th, 2012 at 1:22 pm

I agree that the whining is repetitive and needless, although I can completely understand. Really, we are in the infancy of the web and the standards for a truly open web are only now starting to culminate to actually being a standard. But, playing devil’s advocate, if we as web developers do not complain and take issue with poor browser implementations, unsuspecting users will adopt and use these systems causing progress to be stunted or regress.

Progressive enhancement along with responsive design is the best method for creating a browser/device agnostic user experience. But, I feel an obligation to suggest to friends and family to use Chrome or Firefox simply because it is a safer, more stable internet browsing experience; when IE10 is finally released, I will include it in my recommendation.

Microsoft has come a long way and I applaud the new direction. I am excited for the future of the web and I look forward to the day when “Grandpa Web Developer” talks about olden day when he had to account for all of the quirks in various browsers.

Brandon on July 11th, 2012 at 1:27 pm

@Louis – I understood your article completely and thoroughly disagreed with it. If you can’t understand why someone would want to support all available browsers, and therefore reach the largest possible audience, then I’m afraid we don’t really have a common ground to stand on. Why would you ever want to lock out part of your audience? Is their money no good? Is the “old way” of my thinking that I want to serve as many people as possible? I’m really not understanding your argument.

Once again, the point of my article is to say that it’s time to move beyond blaming Microsoft and Internet Explorer and instead start to be more creative about the way we do things. Your article promotes whining and the “woe is me” attitude I talked about in this post. That’s what I take offense to.

Although I’m not familiar with your work, please don’t take my indictment of your article as an indictment of you personally or your work as a corpus. I simply think that articles like this send the wrong message to the web development community and that we should be moving beyond this line of thinking instead of clinging to it.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 11th, 2012 at 1:42 pm

If I’m reading this article correctly, it’s still okay to bemoan IE6 and 7 and hate people that still use them, IE8 is “stable” so we should cut people who still use it some slack, and IE9 was a lot of hard work so we should cut Microsoft some slack. That’s all fine and dandy, but it seems to miss the point of the Smashing article. IE10 will auto-update, which is arguably the most important feature of modern browsers. If everyone uses auto-updating browsers, designers and developers are free to use newer technologies as soon as browsers are able to support them. And that doesn’t just mean rounded corners and drop-shadows. HTML5 and CSS3 (or even thinking ahead to newer standards) enable us to develop better and faster user experiences. I think that’s the point of the original article. IE8 and even IE9 users will be left behind, as there will be no good way to retrofit the user experience for them. At best, we can give them a “stable” site experience with bare minimum features. And they don’t deserve to be treated like that. So why not try to suggest that they get a modern web browser and clue them into the fact that a better experience awaits them? After all, if I’m reading it right, you feel the same way about IE6 and 7. I don’t understand why you draw a line at IE8. Will you feel the same way in two years when IE8 and IE9 still have a sizable market share while auto-updating IE13, Firefox 25, and Chrome 800.0.x support features we can barely dream possible today?

Jeff on July 11th, 2012 at 1:43 pm

C’mon mr. Zakas… I would change the title of your article to “It’s time to stop blaming AND GET RID OF Internet Explorer”.

Edson on July 11th, 2012 at 1:46 pm

I agree that dealing with IE8+ is a blessing compared to IE& and lower. Dealing with these inferior browser does hold back inovation so I think the tone of the Smashing Magazine article was a bit harsh but it shouldn’t be looked on so negatively. What I’m sure this article will do is inspire new tools deal with this issues like htmlshim.

Shane @shanedasilva87

Shane on July 11th, 2012 at 1:51 pm

@Nicholas For clients in large corporations or businesses that often require IE7, money is not the objective. Education is the biggest barrier. I’ve tried very hard teaching my clients about responsive web design and changing the workflow but most feel it’s too much time and waste of efficiency to make the move to these methods. They are stuck working in a 2004 workflow and don’t see the value in something more progressive. It’s even come to the point where I suggest something possible in CSS that doesn’t work in IE7 and yet they still require me to use JS to enhance IE7/8 so that it’s consistent in all browsers, my main examples being stuff like fixed positioning, creative dropdown menus or rollover background images on links. It’s so silly but they just don’t get it.

Trust me, I’m on your side of throwing cost at them. But, in a similar respect, adding CSS3 animations and other interesting advanced techniques can also increase the time to complete the site (if you’re not using preprocessors, that is!).

Anyway, I do my best to keep moving clients towards today’s browsers. I just want to enlighten you that we are still facing these barriers for old browsers using as much creative problem solving and education as is possible for those clients who aren’t interested in changing their behaviors. Most of my clients are good but some are just slow to change.

Micah on July 11th, 2012 at 1:52 pm

Nicholas,

You “disagreed” with the article? You don’t agree that IE9 lacks support for all those features listed? You don’t agree that IE8 lacks support for all those features listed? I don’t think there’s anything factually wrong or opinionated in that article, at all. So why would you “disagree”? Can you please point out a single statement in that article that you “disagree” with? I really don’t think there’s any one thing you can point to that you can say is categorically “false”.

In fact, for the record, I disagree with Smashing Magazine categorizing that as an “opinion” article, since there really is no opinion: It is a fact that if you have to support IE8/IE9, then the Web as a platform is being held back. That is not under debate. It’s a fact.

And when did I say in that article that *anyone* should stop supporting those browsers? The point of the article was exactly what the title says: To show people why we can’t use a number of features today, confidently, without having to worry about how things “fall back” or how things will be polyfilled. The point was to show developers that we *have* to support our large market browsers (like IE8), and the fact that this is holding us back.

I really don’t see how anyone can possibly disagree with that.

Louis on July 11th, 2012 at 1:52 pm

Devs who constantly moan about ie6,7,8 obviously don’t know their craft.

Progressive enhancement / Graceful degradation – take your pick.

It’s really not that difficult to cater for ie7. ie8 is a breeze – if your code is up to scratch, it renders fine.
No, it may not have all the gee-whiz eye candy, but so long as it functions, that’s ok.

You have to educate clients that these older browsers won’t be up there in terms of features with the new ones.

Yeah, it would be great if we could use CSS3 to it’s full potential – that will happen.
This is the way the web works.
I’ve been building websites since 1995 – it’s a fact that the progression in browsers in terms of real world websites takes a few years to filter through.

At the end of the day, what is more important than any of this, is CONTENT.

Matt on July 11th, 2012 at 1:53 pm

@Jeff – you’re not entirely reading the article correctly. The point was that things are much better than when Internet Explorer 6 and 7 were the dominant browser. I still don’t like whining and complaining rather than doing. The belief that other users will be left behind permanently is a myth. People buy new computers, and Microsoft will continue encouraging them to do so. Those browsers will eventually go away as well and we won’t have to worry about it. In the short term, it’s not worth spending our time complaining. Let’s just build stuff.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 11th, 2012 at 1:54 pm

I disagree that whining about IE is counterproductive. Whether or not things have improved in terms of what IE9 offers versus IE6 (and I agree, the improvement is massive), there are still quite a few areas where IE has not reached parity with Firefox and WebKit-based browsers. Naturally these are the areas developers will complain about when said features could easily meet the needs of the moment.

Back to my point: complaining about it is absolutely productive, because it accomplishes a lot. For one thing, as in any situation, it puts pressure on the transgressor to change (assuming they are listening). While Microsoft’s huge improvements with IE8 and IE9 cannot be attributed to the collective whining of the developer community, to suggest it didn’t play any role at all would be inaccurate at best. A secondary benefit is that it also gives us, as developers, an outlet to vent our frustrations. Yes, frustrations are a part of life, but guess what? Complaining is a fantastic way to “deal with it” when done in an appropriate manner.

tl;dr => Complaining is entirely productive and should be encouraged when done in an appropriate manner.

Nick on July 11th, 2012 at 2:00 pm

[...] It’s time to stop blaming Internet Explorer [...]

On the Internet Explorer blame : Answer to @slicknet’s post on July 11th, 2012 at 2:01 pm

I will have to strongly disagree with the fellow compatriot Nicholas although I respect his experience and background. I have a lot less experience but I think I do have the right to not agree

First of all the post makes one statement that as I already read has many disagree-ers. “IE8 nice, stable browser”. Five words: getElementsByClassName . .. rest of the stuff: http://www.gplus.gr/blog/index.php/2012/07/on-the-internet-explorer-blame-answer-to-slicknets-post/

George Katsanos on July 11th, 2012 at 2:04 pm

Another important thing to note here:

If IE9 and IE10 could be installed on Windows XP, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, and Monday’s article on SM would not have been written. All new browsers work on XP, except the browser that belongs to the manufacturer of XP.

You see, when you’re dealing with a corporation whose values and goals obstruct the values and goals of web standards, then we have no choice but to oppose that. By not allowing IE9+ to install on XP, Microsoft made this bed, and now they’ll have to sleep in it.

Louis on July 11th, 2012 at 2:07 pm

@Nicholas Fair point about complaining; I guess I didn’t quite feel that was the tone of the Smashing article. You say “those browsers will eventually go away” but as your own article points out, IE6 still (still!) has a global market share of 6.3% (one in 20 people to a site with an international audience is far from “gone away” in my opinion). IE6-9 will still have a sizable market share in 5-10 years if history is any indication. So while people won’t be left behind permanently, I do think that “eventually” is a long time to wait at the speed of the internet.

Jeff on July 11th, 2012 at 2:17 pm

I’m currently working on the javascript part of a web-2-print application. You will not believe the numer of problems I’ve had with IE7 & IE8.

If IE8 was such a “nice and stable” browser as you put it, why did they have to rewrite the thing from scratch? The most likely cause for this “rewrite from scratch” is that IE8, contrary to what you postponed, is a crappy browser.

I doubt wether anyone is interested in my frustrations in getting IE to play nice. Each and every serious web-developer must have had a load of disappointments from IE. In case you missed some, here are my latest frustrations with IE: http://dutch-code-junkie.blogspot.nl/2012/06/times-they-are-changing.html

A budget of US$100 million and a staff of 1.000 people lead to several versions of a sub-standard browser. Other companies, with only a fraction of the budget and staff MS spilled on this, were a lot more successful. If a budget of US$100mln, a staff of 1.000 professionals and sub-standard products isn’t proof of failure, what is? When will reality kick in at MS?

I wish I’d earned a penny for every hour web developers world-wide have spend on tweaking their HTML, CSS and Javascript in order to get IE play nice with their content. My firm belief is that would make me a richer man than Gates himself.

It certainly isn’t time to stop blaming Internet Explorer. On the contrary. It’s time to let reality kick in and come to the conclusion that MS disqualified itself as browser vendor long ago and to be very suspect of IE9 and IE10.

Their goal in developing IE most probably was not to provide the best browser a user could get. If that truly was their goal, they miserably failed. I suspect they saw IE as a tool that would enable them to construct vendor lock in. A tool that would let them rule the web. And there’s lots of stuff in all IE versions that support this vendor lock in.

By the looks of IE9 it seems MS came to the conclusion their tactics with previous versions of IE didn’t work. Perhaps, for the first time in MS history, they came to the conclusion that the key to success is to provide customers with a first class product. But with a lot of first class web browsers available from other parties, this conclusion might come a little late.

J.W. Luiten on July 11th, 2012 at 2:59 pm

@Nick – I would agree that some complaining can be productive, but we’re going on ten years of IE bashing. I get it. Microsoft gets it. Everyone gets it. We’re not accomplishing anything anymore. It’s time to move on.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 11th, 2012 at 3:07 pm

@George – feel free to disagree, but you haven’t actually said what you agree with. This post was not about saying IE is up to snuff standards-wise. It’s about getting everyone to stop piling on Internet Explorer because we’re no longer accomplishing anything by doing it. IE8 isn’t as good as IE9, IE9 isn’t as good as IE10, there’s no debate there.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 11th, 2012 at 3:09 pm

Absolutely agree that it’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools, standards rule and Microsoft has made huge strides but clients, bless their hearts, obsess over a pixel perfect,cross browser experience. I also agree that it’s our job to try our best and show them the light but I just can’t get over the hours of wasted time at the hands of IE6 and 7. No mater how good IE9 is, I’m still mad.

jlemesur on July 11th, 2012 at 3:50 pm

No, it’s not time to stop blaming IE. It’s still a healthy contributor to making more work for people who already have mountainous backlogs.

However, I think it can be fairly said that it’s not worth wasting bandwidth on it now that Microsoft is moving in the right direction (though not without some missteps: there are regressions in IE9 rendering from IE8).

RDean on July 11th, 2012 at 4:26 pm

This recent blog post from Joshua Bixby at Strangeloop seems especially relevant to your point, Nicholas, about never wanting to lock out a user just because they’re using an older browser. The “Takeaways” are especially important and relevant to this conversation…

http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2012/07/10/internet-explorer-8-default-web-performance-test/

In the end, I think his best advice is “know your users… and their browsers.”

Steve C on July 11th, 2012 at 5:21 pm

I think IE 6 was a fine browser. It’s been around too long but it was SO good in 2000. I absolutely loathe IE 7. The only practical things that changed were 32bit transparency on PNGs and multi class selectors. For that I got another test target.

IE 8 is a fine browser but not a modern browser. My favorite was when the IE team asked developers “what do you want” and the first 40 posts on the blog entry are “canvas” and then they had the nerve to write marketing copy toting it having the features devs wanted most.

For applications, it’s a different matter. I consider IE 6-8 to be “old IE” and they get kicked to the curb whenever I can justify a captive audience. If I’m billing for an app it’s 20% extra for IE8 and 40% for IE6/7. I believe this reasonably captures the extra effort needed but nobody cares enough to spend the money. IE 9 can be annoying (drag and drop file uploads!) but it 90% works with little enough effort that supporting it is just part of normal business on the web.

Karl G on July 11th, 2012 at 5:57 pm

I get your point out here that you do not like the fact that people complain about a ‘primitive’ browser. But do you really consider the fact that even if Microsoft did rebuild it from scratch, it is still not up to the mark. It is not close to Firefox/Chrome and will never be.

They should rather quit from the browser business and move their resources to a much more fruitful product.

Aniket Pant on July 11th, 2012 at 8:22 pm

Nicholas, I agree with you completely. And the way you describe the power of progressive enhancement is, well …get out of my head!

But I also understand the push-back that others are giving here. I think it comes down to this:

When we talk about “supporting” a browser, we need to define what me mean by “support” (whether it’s when we’re writing articles for Smashing Magazine, signing contracts with clients, or having conversations with fellow developers).

When people talk about the pain of “supporting” IE6 or 7 or 8, do they mean “trying to make it work like it does in more modern browsers” or do they mean “allows the user to accomplish their task?” If it’s the former, then the “woe is me” attitude is understandable. Personally, I’m a great believer in the latter definition.

Websites do not need to look (or behave) the same in every browser. Once that is truly taken to heart, then the issue of “supporting” Internet Explorer is no longer such a big deal.

I tried to kickstart this conversation about defining “support” a couple of years back in an article on 24 Ways.

Jeremy Keith on July 11th, 2012 at 10:02 pm

[...] It’s time to stop blaming Internet Explorer [...]

Things You’ll Find Interesting July 11, 2012 | Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author on July 11th, 2012 at 10:30 pm

Respected Author,

My question would be that Microsoft has been there in browsers industry since a looooong time. So how much time as users, we can wait IE to be at par with browsers which came very late in the competition and doing a lot better.

W@rfi on July 11th, 2012 at 10:58 pm

I agree with you on everything. However, I think microsoft missed something when they rewrote IE: autoupdating. At the pace firefox, chrome and opera update the latest IE browser soon becomes the browser that’s causing problems again.

Kevin on July 11th, 2012 at 11:00 pm

@Louis – I’m somewhat confused by your last statement, that Microsoft’s choice to not support IE9+ on Windows XP is a bad thing. Windows XP was released in October 2001 which is close to 11 years ago. If we look back the OS X version at the time was Puma, 10.1. Now correct me if I’m wrong but Safari 5 doesn’t work on Puma, in fact I don’t think Safari 5 works on anything prior Tiger (10.5).

Is it unrealistic to expect that Microsoft is not wanting to support a product which was slated for end of life in 2009, 3 years ago now (for the record that was the original EOL period, it has since been extended)? XP, like IE6, had many advantages in its day but that is well past so expecting Microsoft to be turning out new software to support it is just as illogical an argument as web developers designing for IE6.

I agree with Nicholas, a poor tradesman blames his tools.

Aaron Powell on July 11th, 2012 at 11:30 pm

Old? Yes.
but also
True? Yes.

Stjepan on July 12th, 2012 at 12:13 am

After so many comments, I won’t be read, but here’s my view.
If so many of you talk about “missing the point” that’s because you all agree on the fact that IE’s lack of features and auto-update are a burden. Point taken.
But why on Earth publish such a text on SM, that only webdevs will read ? They already know, that’s just good old complaining and makes the author sound like a… ok let’s not trolll
Were both articles lame and useless then? Absolutely not, because they brought this discussion.

But what now?
When do we start suggesting solutions? I’m not talking about progressive enhancement – that’s doing our job – but inciting anyone who can to switch to better browsers? That’s not in SM, that’s in mainstream websites, that’s by adding icons saying “have a peek at what your experience would be with a modern browser”, that’s… yours to say!

Tristan on July 12th, 2012 at 12:30 am

Since Windows 8′s IE will support Flash nativelly …

I never tought i will say it, but : I LOVE IE.

Sorry Chrome and Safary – but if you do not wanna carre for the end-users, we ( the end users ) will find someone else which does.

Yordan Yanakiev on July 12th, 2012 at 12:32 am

Personally I would include IE10 in that list.

As for your post and the Smashing article it’s a matter of personal opinion as well as a matter of perspective. Yes you can say the smashing article – which I have not read – is frustrating. You can also say it’s correct. Depending on what you’re developing.

If you think IE 8 is a nice stable browser, fine, use it, personally I find the lack of File API, XHR2, FormData, CSS gradients, etc in IE 9 meant it was dropped from support for our project. It’s not good enough for the experience we want to provide our clients who pay to use our product. It’s cheaper to buy them a mac and say here for the million or so your paying us to use our product, we’ll save you – and ourselves – the hassle and buy you a computer to use our product with.

Do you know why IE9/ 10 is not supported by windows XP? I don’t but the premise is the same for web browsers, they are the operating systems of the internet and your web site/ app is the software that runs on them, so you draw a line in the sand. What’s the difference here? Would you say the fact that Adobe CS6 isn’t supported on windows 95 is frustrating?

One could also say your post – which I have also not bothered to finish reading – is frustrating. You need to understand the amount of sway someone with your standing in our community has and I HAVE FOUGHT A LONG HARD BATTLE against having to work with people who jump on every bandwagon that comes up when peole like you write posts like this.

Yeah, woe is me, I’ve been developing web sites since 1998 and I’ve been developing web apps since 2006, so yeah, I can say IE 6-10 at the time of the Smashing article’s writing suck! I wouldn’t necessarily lump FireFox < 12, Safari < 5, Chrome < 19 in that boat, because they don't fail as epically as IE does, need I remind you of this gem: http://ankurbhatia.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/iecrash1.jpg?w=600

IE 6 was once innovative, then a bunch of companies developed apps using ActiveX and locked a large part of the financial services sector into staying with IE 6 due to this reason.

As for IE 9 and 10, they're a vast improvement on 6-8 and a move in the right direction for MicroSoft, but I'm sorry to say that compared to chrome, safari and firefox they still suck a big, long, hard and fat phallus… Just like windows metro is still nowhere near as good as mac osx – and it pains me to say that – and i won't even start on ubuntu, terminal not included.

The reason so many devs complain about IE is because it makes itself easy to complain about. Do you really think people like complaining about IE more than they would like to do be getting on with their job without the fear of having to "support IE" after developing in chrome and finding it works fine in safari and firefox (for them most part)?

I have immense respect for you, but this post is kinda weird…

Jimmy de Smittz on July 12th, 2012 at 1:14 am

@Nicholas C. Zakas:
Progressive enhancement doesn’t work in a world where our clients call the shots. If they don’t use IE, it’s generally OK, they understand that IE is an inferior choice and don’t mind if IE users get a bit of “graceful degradation”. If they use IE, they need all features working 100% in IE and the design needs to be pixel-perfect.

To be fair, one of the first questions we ask someone when they come to us for a web site should be “what browser do you use?” If they say Internet Explorer, we can just let someone else deal with them. Of course, we run a business, so we can’t. but we wish we could.

So, I stand by the point that IE, and its users, are holding back the web.

Colin on July 12th, 2012 at 1:25 am

Personally I think its a bit lazy not to support older borwsers. Maybe with the exception of ie6, but even then there is no need for your site not to be usable in that browser.

A lot of developers and designers think that the general public understand upgrading and the latest software just because they do. And they say bollocks to those who don’t.
There are many instances where people have to use older browsers and I personally cannot afford to tell clients that I’ll only support ie10 that’s just bonkers.

The difference between a professional developer and a kid knocking one out in his bedroom is our ability to make a decent site work for everyone (isn’t it) otherwise anybody with a copy of FrontPage or Dreamweaver could do my job.

I pride myaself on been a decent developer, and part of that is I can get sites to work in many versions of ie, not just the latest one.

Geoff Vader on July 12th, 2012 at 1:44 am

Colin:

“So, I stand by the point that IE, and its users, are holding back the web.”

I’m sorry but that’s just utter knackers.
It’s like saying people who watch a 17 inch CRT tele are holding back the film industry. Or people who drive classic cars are holding back the automotive industry.

Technology advances and some people have access to it and some people don’t. Build your sites with fancy CSS3 and HTML5 for those that can see it and degrade well for those that can’t. They can still access the site without all the bells and whistles.

That comment really does make me cringe at the attitude of todays developers.

Geoff Vader on July 12th, 2012 at 1:50 am

A good illustration of what happens when you break the trust existing between you and your customers. Once this link broken it’s quite hard to rebuild it, whatever your efforts. Now that people have massively switched to FF and Chrome, they see no reason to get back to IE which was such a PITA… and why should they, now that they are happy with the alternatives?

DrSchizo on July 12th, 2012 at 2:03 am

Technically some clients do “hold guns to our heads” make us develop for IE6 for occasional military/govt projects…last time I checked, they do have guns.

Keith on July 12th, 2012 at 2:54 am

I agree with this article’s main objective, and that is to stop complaining about IE. If any web developer is worth his salt, he will find working solutions for his modern design implementations for IE6-8, even if it is by using hacks. Point is, many users still use IE 6-9, cause they JUST DON”T CARE about Chrome and FF and their superiority over IE. Many web users don’t even know how to install chrome/ff.
Good point you’re making Nicholas C. Zakas, but one thing is certain, in a perfect we world, IE must be banished!

David on July 12th, 2012 at 4:12 am

Dear Dude,
Install Chrome.

Roy on July 12th, 2012 at 4:23 am

I’ve written websites for 15 years. I’ve never, not even once, had a site that didn’t work in IE and Firefox/Netscape/etc. Not once. These are full-featured, data-driven web sites. I have never understood why there is this attitude that “things don’t work in IE”. It makes no sense to me that developers spend time making excuses based on the browser. Write better code that doesn’t rely solely on CSS trickery and style tags. Then it doesn’t matter if it’s Chrome or IE or something that hasn’t been invented yet.

I am *not* advocating for full backwards support of “old browsers” (IE 6 has no reason to be here anymore, just like old versions of Firefox should go away). One version back on any browser is all I would officially support. But this notion that IE is *the problem* in web development is baloney. The problem in web development is web developers.

Rob on July 12th, 2012 at 4:42 am

Parts of ACID3 had to be disabled to get IE9 pass the test. TO me, this just means MS hasn’t significantly improved its capability of properly implementing open web standards since IE6. If complaining about this ten years ago was OK, why wouldn’t it be OK today?

Entities much smaller than MS, investing a lot less resources, are creating better browsers. Clearly there’s something wrong with MS, if they’re not able to create a comparably good browser. So what makes it wrong to complain about this?

Main point: by not sticking to standards, not even in IE9, MS is not doing the web any good – GUI development for the web is almost twice as costly because you need to practically develop two versions of your GUI, and double the test effort. Most users switching from IE6 to IE8 won’t change this. IE10 isn’t yet out on a massive scale, so any talk about it is just assumptions.

Anonymous Coward on July 12th, 2012 at 5:22 am

It’s an interesting article. From what I’ve heard, IE9 is a good improvement, enough so to not be considered a bad browser. I haven’t used it enough though to comment. I can confirm IE8 is stable at least, albeit prone to going into Not Responding half the time.
I consider IE still the worst browser out of the bunch, but a rewrite from scratch was a good idea. Not supporting the older OSes such as XP (which MS have actually extended the support for by several years) was not.
What I find odd is that Microsoft made some beasty OSes, and they can’t manage a good browser up ’til v9. Or maybe further.

Phi ? on July 12th, 2012 at 5:25 am

Nicholas,

Complaining about complaining about Internet Explorer has gotten old.

Thanks.

Pepperoni on July 12th, 2012 at 5:33 am

Well, I disagree with this article, in my company they are frontend developpers and all clients receive IE6-9 support always, but its a really big waste of time and patience, I am sure of that! I work part frontend and I really really hate IE, it is the worst browser I know, yes it was ok in the begginings, but now, not even the “they rebuild from start” is valid, firefox was created from start and google chrome too, and IE9 dont have a lot of features that Firefox, Chrome or Opera have, IE is an outdated browser and even in IE10 they are already features that are not working correctly… please.. Internet is growing every single minute and IE is just not helping..

Michel on July 12th, 2012 at 5:54 am

I build for IE8+ as well as all modern browsers. I let clients know that some of the newer features won’t work on older browsers without a lot of extra work. It’s a bit like buying a luxury car, you have to know that the fine handling and comfortable ride will not be as fine or as comfortable on a gravel road. IE8 is that gravel road, clients that don’t get that point are not worth the trouble unless they are willing to pay the cost.

The thing I do complain about is M$ decision to not support IE9 and 10 on XP. This is a blatant attempt to force users to upgrade to Vista or W7 to add to the M$ bottom line. It has backfired and left us with IE8 becoming the new IE6.

Peter Wooster on July 12th, 2012 at 5:58 am

I am not optimally satisfied with any version of Internet explorer. They need to let the enhancement get close or beyond the other browsers. Its still frustrating to design based on browser-specific coding, it should be free and compatible with any code style a designer use.

Moreover @Nicholas, I believe serious disagreement and negation reports will challenge Microsoft to enhance IE not giving the excuse but I don’t support total condemnation.

Thanks for opening this up anyway.

Yourme on July 12th, 2012 at 6:09 am

Great article, and I agree with all your points, I develop web applications every day in .net and the only browser that present a real headache are pre IE8 (it has quirks but they are not difficult to get around) but we still have a lot of clients who still use IE6 and as long as you take this into consideration from the start and design it with IE6 in mind then you won’t have any problems, admittedly you won’t be able to give it all the nice bells and whistles that you can in other browsers, but as a developer with a customer requirement then you just have to get on with it.

Huw on July 12th, 2012 at 6:36 am

The reason I stopped programming and supporting Internet Explorer is its stupid javascript support, doesn’t support CSS3 and sometimes a bad page can block the whole explorer.exe (fixed in Windows 7). Not only that but the ActiveX are very open (perhaps there are some securities in IE9) and what’s worse, it says the popup is blocked while it’s popping on my head.

Let’s face it, Internet Exploder was designed for text and letters at some background. The rest everything in handled in the worst way. I had to make many parallel javascript and CSS codes for Internet Explorer and yet even with that, everything is messed up. Firefox isn’t innocent either and now Chrome is starting to become ill. I’ll stick with Opera for now since it only fill 500MB of my RAM….

Kallel on July 12th, 2012 at 6:37 am

It’s definitely IE and MS holding the web wide world back, reasons:

* Debugging IE, any version is horrible and so far from what Chrome/FF can offer. Locating IE specific bugs therefor takes X times longer. Dev productivity is very low and frustration is no surprise.

* IE update cycle, still ages away from what other browsers do. Support for new HTML/CSS standards and proposals sneak into new versions seamlessly (not always a good thing, but way better than no updates ever).

* The never-update argument can also be made for MS Visual Studio. Since it never updates itself, its CSS syntax validator still complains about simple CSS2 & CSS3 rules, because its ruleset is stale.

If you still insist IEx is a nice stable browser:

* Write a web-to print solution (as already suggested), supporting IE8/9 in Quirks mode

Still convinced:

* Write a DOM test framework

Mats on July 12th, 2012 at 6:46 am

All versions of IE come with their own problems.

The best thing Microsoft could do is stop this ongoing disaster and pull the plug on any future IE versions. For the good of the internet – fire all the talentless drones who are responsible for probably the worst products ever released.

Microsoft need to stop embarrassing themselves.

wtf on July 12th, 2012 at 6:48 am

Oops, forgot to mention: I hate IE.

Mats on July 12th, 2012 at 6:51 am

One advantage of IE is that it does not contain Google’s espionage technologies which are used in Firefox or Chrome. With those you allow Google to scan each and every text and picture coming from the net. As a byproduct you can use that for “Safe Browsing” and “Parental Control”. Nice gift, indeed.

SchweizerGarde on July 12th, 2012 at 6:51 am

Dear Nick,

We web developers have moved on since long before this post.
There are real browsers, and ones that suck. IE (Any variant) falls in to the Suck category.
I listen to Microsoft developer podcasts in which the MS folks apologize for IE 9. Are they some how wrong about their own product?

I agree complaining does not accomplish much. But if Microsoft developers are apologizing for it too, you know its bad…

You seem to spend alot of time in this article rehashing the browser wars, and while that is interesting it does not have anything to do with where we are today.

Today, there are standards, that if adhered to cause “things” to “work” if not, those “things” “dont”.

In recent years, Microsoft has made great strides in standards compliance. Thats like saying that Microsoft has made great strides in desktop security. Which they have, its just that they still cant get it right after 20 years…

How modern the browser is, how new and shiny the internals are does not really matter. It takes us extra effort to make sure that sites work with any variant of IE. Why cant Microsoft address that issue, and do what the other browser makers do: Let us code once, and have that code work well.

This is why we should not stop blaming IE.

David on July 12th, 2012 at 6:52 am

I agree that IE9 should not be paired with 6-8, but I refuse to stop raising awareness that people should upgrade to more recent versions of browsers to ensure security and quality of what users are viewing on the web.

Rob on July 12th, 2012 at 7:08 am

I agree.

I have been developing rich web experiences for 20 years, and I have *never* had to adjust to make IE work. I’ve had more problems with chrome (specifying an image height without width causes a 1px wide image) and firefox (be careful not to abbreviate your closing tag.) I basically ignore safari, since most of my sites require features that apple disables (try uploading a file.)

Code based on standard, best-practices and IE will work every time.

Robert J. Good on July 12th, 2012 at 7:21 am

[...] interesting article that calls for people to stop blaming IE and older browsers for holding the web back, when methodologies exist to handle them. Make sure [...]

Thursday Linkage (7-12-2012) | I'm James Hall. on July 12th, 2012 at 7:33 am

Before I get started, I would just like to say that IE6 gets a bad rap. Not that it was a good browser, but the box model bug was not a bug — Microsoft got it right; W3 got it wrong.W3′s vision was extremely short-sighted and makes certain CSS layouts impossible. I’d much rather have it IE6′s way.

Anyway, I completely agree with this post, but I also disagree. That is, you are correct that we need to be mature enough to accept what our job entails and, and the end of the day, just get it done. BUT would we have a brand new IE9 if it weren’t for all the complaining about IE’s shortcomings? If everyone just went about their business, bit the bullet and kept quiet about Microsoft’s complete ineptitude in the browser department, would MS have really felt a need to improve their product?

In a free market, creativity drives some companies to innovate, and complaints drive others to keep up with current trends. Complaints are also the only real defense we have against an industry behemoth such as MS. Sure, we can just not use IE, but as long as it comes bundled with new PCs, we will be in the minority. And raising our voices in unified complaint is one of the few ways we have to hold MS accountable for their actions in their quest for world domination. And to Microsoft’s credit, they are responding. In fact, these past couple of years have shown Microsoft to be more innovative than they have been in over a decade.

So I would say to all the people who want to complain: Do it! Write a blog. Write a forum post. Shout it for the world to hear. Get it off your chest and make your voice heard.

Then shut up and get to work.

ScottM on July 12th, 2012 at 7:34 am

I have over 20 years of experience as an embedded software engineer. None of that is with web based applications, web sites or programming for web browsers. I write software to make machines go. Many times my software must be compatible with different machines, or the machines get updated and the software doesn’t work anymore. Sometimes there is a need to add new features. I make that happen. This seems the same principle as what’s being discussed here.

From my personal experience on the web with one of my hobbies, surveys, I have run into all sorts of fun compatibilities issues that seemed to be lazy or incompetent web site programming. I’ll log into a survey with IE9, only to have it hang. No problem, I turn around and fire up my Mac and try the same thing with the most recent Safari. It will often work where IE9 fails. The irony is the next survey might fail to run correctly on Safari, so it’s back to IE9 or maybe my ICS Android tablet to the rescue. Opera for Android works well much of the time. I’ve even been known to fire up virtual XP and run IE8 to get by.

What seems difficult to understand for a lay person is that these errant web site don’t seem that sophisticated or complex. I assume that’s my ignorance of the specifics involved.

David Sommers on July 12th, 2012 at 8:15 am

I agree completely, complaining about a browser that is used by only a small fractions of users(most of which are in China) is a complete and utter waste of time, and the people writing articles like “IE6 is ruing the lives of web developers” should go get hit by a truck, maybe that will wake them up to the reality that IE6 has become utterly irrelevant for most of us. (For example, the only thing i had to do for IE6 on our company website, was detect it, and ask clients nicely to upgrade or the site will not render properly).
That being said, though i sing in praise of our users who switched to IE8, I would much happier if they would have switched to Chrome or Firefox.

Duke on July 12th, 2012 at 8:16 am

Chrome is an awesome browser. I personally don’t like ie. Simply because Chrome stores all my repetitive data while making websites.., makes my life easier.

William Nangauta on July 12th, 2012 at 8:16 am

I agree with you on the most part, IE9 (can’t remember 8 now) is stable and works great for me, but (there’s always got to be a but) it is slow. Thus I use Chrome. I don’t care about addons and features that much, just want to get where I am going fast. I just wish Microsoft would update the javascript rendering engine in IE9 to make it run faster, never mind lots of new features, just make it faster.

Hark on July 12th, 2012 at 8:22 am

I could not disagree more with this article. In this competitive world, no one is guaranteed or deserves a second chance. Why should we sympathize for them (Microsoft) on trying harder this time (IE9)? It is so arrogant for Microsoft and their small pack of followers to think that web developers are going to constantly put up with their lack of innovation. Each web developer can make a choice to spend a lot of extra time (at the clients expense) to make the website cooperate with IE (whatever version), or not. The cost to the developer: Users that use IE will not enjoy the user-experience as desired. The cost to microsoft: users will stop using their IE browser. It is also the job of web developers to bring the best user-experience to each of its users, which is educating and steering users away from IE.
It took Apple over 20 years to make up for some decisions they made in the early 80s. Now they are at the top of the game. Why do you think that Microsofts’s latest version of IE all of sudden needs all of our respect. Again, that is very arrogant.

Nick on July 12th, 2012 at 8:35 am

“Microsoft is listening, so continuing to complain doesn’t do anything except perpetuate an attitude that I would rather not have in web development. ”

WRONG. Yes Microsoft is listening but it’s foolish to say that containing to complain doesn’t do anything except perpetuate an attitude that you would rather not have in development. It may perpetuate an attitude you don’t like but that’s not all it does. How so?

When customers/users don’t complain about some product/service then the perception by the provider of said product or service is that the customer/user base is satisfied else they would be voicing their discontent. When customers/users stop complaining then the perception by the provider is that regardless of what has happened there is no longer the same level of dissatisfaction and so the changes made so far must be sufficient if any have actually been made.

I mean no disrespect but while your intentions may be good your logic is flawed. This mindset of “sit down and shut up already” is the same complacency attitude has allowed private sector entities to engage in actions that previous generations would not have tolerated because they would have voiced their dissatisfaction and would not just “sit down and shut up”. If you want to take the “go along to get along” approach that’s your right but don’t assume your perception is the norm that all others need to conform to.

IE9 has some pros and come cons and the user base needs to keep voicing their dissatisfaction as loudly as possible until real change is made.

ecarden on July 12th, 2012 at 9:05 am

Time everybody in the web biz is doing “making IE behave” is time lost, so it is in fact non-compliant browsers like IE that hold the web back. Even if it is “in your job description to waste time”…

Time spent there is time I can’t spend exploring e.g. making other sites retina- or mobile-ready..

Tom Hermans on July 12th, 2012 at 9:13 am

@Tom – that’s just the nature of what we do. Truth be told, I spend a lot of time these days trying to make Firefox behave. If you don’t enjoy making things work cross browser and figuring out the differences, then you’re probably in the wrong field.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 9:36 am

@ecarden – No disrespect taken, but I think that you missed the point. I agree that complaining about products and services helps to make them better. The problem is that we’re complaining about the same things over and over again in browsers that have a decreasing usage. We already know the problems, and each subsequent version of Internet Explorer is fixing them, we should be focusing on new issues and not old ones.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 9:38 am

Are you kidding me? IE is the WORST browser of the bunch. There is even a site (sponsored by a web action group funded by MSFT, ironically) dedicated to the countdown of non-support, for example:
http://www.ie6countdown.com/

There are e-comm sites charging 8-10% for using IE because of the extra time it takes for bugs related ONLY to IE:
http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2012/06/15/online-retailer-charges-tax-to-ie-users/

This is because the VP of Engineering for that company calculated the additional development and maintenance cost for making his site work with IE.

You don’t see this stuff for other browsers and most other browsers handle the web in a very consistent fashion.

IE 6 & 7 are still the main corporate desktop standard for a lot of very big companies and that is part of the problem.

The buggiest browser by far? IE variants. And the type of exploits/defects are portions of the WORST classes of bugs (eg buffer under and over runs and handling of script stack, and JVM / plugin integration).

IE is trash.

MrHappy on July 12th, 2012 at 9:40 am

@ScottM – as I tried to clarifying the post, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t complain about things. Yes, we were right to complain about Internet Explorer 6 languishing without an upgrade for years. My point is that we are still complaining about the same things now even though Microsoft has committed to updating Internet Explorer with regular frequency. I would love to stop hearing people complain about Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, and realize that 9 was just the first step in the right direction. In short: let’s complain about new things rather than the same old ones.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 9:40 am

@Rob – I never said that you shouldn’t encourage people to upgrade. I’m all for that!

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 9:41 am

Thanks for posting something that should be completely obvious but still somehow goes against the grain of hip techie nerd groupthink. The web will advance not by complaining about Microsoft but by actually making web apps work.

Roger on July 12th, 2012 at 9:43 am

@David – it’s Nicholas, not Nick. I wouldn’t say that Microsoft apologizing is an indication of anything in particular. There are plenty of bad bugs and mistakes that are made in software all the time and people never apologize for it. In my career, I can think of a number of things off the top of my head that I did wrong and I should apologize for but no one will ever ask me about that.

And as I’ve mentioned in other comments, we don’t just struggle making things work in Internet Explorer. Trying to make things work across multiple browsers is difficult and it will always be one browser that is harder than the others. Recently, I’ve had a lot more trouble with Firefox and I have with anything else. That doesn’t mean that I hate Firefox, it just means that it’s something I need to spend a bit more time on to do my job correctly. And I’m happy to do that.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 9:43 am

@wtf – all browsers have their shortcomings. That’s not an Internet Explorer thing, it’s a software thing.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 9:43 am

@Peter – that’s the best way to deal with it, and congratulations on having the intelligence to do it that way. We should definitely complain about new things that Microsoft might not be aware of.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 9:45 am

@Anonymous – ACID3 is an arbitrary measurement. I don’t put too much weight behind it. Use the browser, develop on it, then give your opinion.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 9:46 am

@Rob – hear, hear!

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 9:46 am

@David – don’t blame the users, most barely even know how to use a computer.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 9:47 am

@Keith – yes, I’m sure that they literally hold guns to people’s heads.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 9:47 am

I don’t think the problem is so much IE 6 or IE 7 or IE 8 but Microsoft’s braindead strategy of tying different versions of their browser to the operating system. This is was so bad for users that the European Commission forced Microsoft to offer users a choice. Microsoft’s anti-competitive, anti-consumer position is to blame. As a result users are stuck with a poor browser and developers are stuck with trying to support it.

While I think all good developers would love just to be able to support standards that isn’t the case. It costs time and money to do it right and it shouldn’t have to be like this. Why won’t Microsoft backport IE 10 to Windows 7, IE 9 to XP and IE 8 to Windows 2000?

At the other end of the scale, Chrome’s release schedule causes its own problems. It would be nice to see LTS for 18 months or better 3 years for all browsers and perhaps a common test suite for them.

Finally, we *should* continue the whining because it’s having an effect. Microsoft’s combined browser marketshare is finally starting to drop markedly. If we hadn’t started moaning that might never have happened and if we stop maybe the next “dark age” won’t be long in coming.

Charlie Clark on July 12th, 2012 at 10:19 am

@Charlie – as I’ve mentioned in other comments, I never said we should stop complaining about everything. It’s just time to stop complaining about the same things over and over again. Yes, our complaining got Microsoft to restart Internet Explorer development program. That was effective. Continuing to complain about the older browsers is a waste of time. I also don’t think it’s fair to single Microsoft out as doing things like tying browsers to operating systems. Apple does the same thing.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 11:01 am

Ok, I don’t think anyone will argue that IE9 sucks a lot less than all predecessors. But that’s setting the bar really low. No single iteration of IE has made me not frustrated with the plethora of open standards that, instead of just plain not supporting, it badly mangles or breaks. From javascript oddities (because the team involved seems more intent on backing Microsoftian “JScript” than actual ECMA script) to css hacks and strange box models, it’s all there. One of the crowning cherries is the horribly slow XSLT transformer which took a weekend to render a transform which took a few seconds on an old build of Firefox.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m all for competition — that’s the blood pumping through the veins of web innovation. But I’m pretty tired (and I’m sure other devs are too) of having to hack around the stupidities in IE. Personally, I understand that some people like the interface of IE. For some reason. Which I can’t fathom. But if the IE team just plain can’t get the basics right, perhaps it’s time to give up and use someone else’s renderer. Pick one from Opera, Webkit or Gecko. I don’t care. Just pick one which is backed by developers who care about documented standards more than trying to push the boundaries. Because whilst experimental features are neat and all, bread-and-butter features are what developers use to put bread-and-butter on their tables. The more time I have to spend fighting a browser, the less time I’m putting into making an awesome product for my users.

IE has consistently sucked time out of my day that could have rather been spent on making sites brilliant. Or, to put it another way: I haven’t devved something targeting IE which broke another browser, but I have often devved using Chrome primarily (the dev tools are great — though FF 15 is really stepping up here), tested in FF and/or Opera, been ecstatic that I can tick off another great feature, reminded myself that the user-base is corporate and at least some of them are forced into using IE, fired up IE and had that sinking feeling as I’ve had to realise that I need to delve into the murky pits of the IE dev tools (or wait aeons for VS to hook in there) so that I can figure out some way to work around the next quirk in IE.

You want me to lay off of IE? GIve me back all the time and innovation IE has stolen from me. You can’t? Heh. Imagine that.

Davyd McColl on July 12th, 2012 at 11:27 am

@Nicholas, Sorry. It seemed like you were talking about people complaining about IE9, too. I had to re-read it to see they were only complaining about its market share. I do agree that there is no point in complaining about something that has already been fixed.

ScottM on July 12th, 2012 at 11:31 am

Nicholas -
Your summary paragraph does really say it all. By the vast majority of the comments, unfortunately, many of your peers are not “better than that”. As a primarily backend and process developer generally forced by resource constraints to code the front end too in many cases, (and I certainly make no superioristic assertions about the whiz-bangyness of my user experiences), my view of the matter is in pretty strong alignment with yours.
Architecturally, I would expect to provide some form of data structure to a UX developer, and expect that their job is to present that information to the user in a quality manner to the satisfaction of the customer, which would then be required to be satisfactory to their customers. If your audience is entirely within an intranet and the customer can be convinced to exclusively deploy the latest Firefox, Chrome or whatever exclusively to their intranet, knock yourself out. Let me know how that’s working for you.
The web is the real world. It is nowhere near realistic for web developers to claim that old browsers are holding the web back. If you really want to show off for me, you need to be able to provide the best user experience possible to the breadth of base as specified by your customer. Nothing more, nothing less. Anything else is not doing your job. It is about pleasing your customers, and your customer’s customers, not the showing off on a platform or two and whining about not being able to show off because a particular browser doesn’t have this particular cutting edge capability.
The big thing to consider with the web is that the incredibly vast majority of web users just want to find or buy or whatever what they want, when they want, and generally don’t care if they “oooh” and “ahhh” when all they want to do is find what the high was and how much rain fell yesterday, a quick summary of last night’s football game, or buy an online copy of “Maintainable Javascript”, especially when the UX developer’s own bloats to show off separate them from what they want to do.
Lastly, if I saw or heard a lot of these comments during a hiring process, the resume of the individual in question would find immediately its way into file 13…

Brian on July 12th, 2012 at 11:40 am

I just don’t understand why Microsoft didn’t or doesn’t conform to the W3C standards. They are published. The standards don’t always list implementation detail, but, this is no reason for Microsoft to ignore soo many features. When I build a website I shouldn’t have to test it against IE 9, 8, 7; FF 13, 12, 11, 10, you get the picture. I stopped supporting IE6 last year. Standards are the standards and they should be followed. A few years back I switched to FF because it most closely adhered to W3C standards. I realize Microsoft is this big huge conglomerate software company that feels it should set the standards for web browsers, but it isn’t setting the standards’ an independent body is. I have been using Microsoft products since the early 90′s and started with Microsoft Visual Basic for DOS. Anybody remember that. I like IE 9 and can’t wait for IE 10; but all the web browsers need to adhere to the standards and that’s that. Come on folks make my life easier.

Mike Hanson on July 12th, 2012 at 11:48 am

I keep hearing about “standards compliance” and I have to ask: Who’s standards?

Certainly not the HTML5 spec because it’s not final (not signed off on in any way), it’s still a draft, therefore cannot be a “standard”. So again, who’s standards? Yours? Joe’s? Sally’s?

Or do you mean *draft* HTML5 spec compliant?

Please understand, I’m not saying draft HTML5 adherence is necessarily a bad thing, but when you adopt too soon, and things change because it’s still in draft, then who’s screwed in the end?

That’s right, the users. Not you because you get paid to update based upon the changes.

Oh, wait, you get paid to write webpages? Someone gives you good money to write webpages?

Then seriously, quite your bitching, older browsers == job security. Or are you bitching that you want to make lots of money and be lazy, only write for one browser?

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Polly Proteus on July 12th, 2012 at 11:56 am

I agree completely with this article. While IE6 was, indeed, a horrible thing, the current browser set, including IE9, are all completely usable, supportable and programmable. Sure, there are some things which don’t translate well (rounded corners in CSS, for example) but there are ways around this… or you can just decided that these things don’t really matter. But from a functionality standpoint, all the major browsers these days are acceptably compatible: if I were to single out any browser as being annoying and not doing what one wants, it’d be Firefox — especially the Mac version. But I think the author is correct: people need to stop complaining and start doing what they’re supposed to be good at doing.

Dan Sutton on July 12th, 2012 at 11:59 am

I am not blaming IE, I am blaming Microsoft for some VERY POOR choices. I have been a HUGE Microsoft advocate for years and still am. I prefere their Dev environments and their languages.

If FIrefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome can be written to work in XP, Vista, WIndows 7 and 8, then why not IE.

The precious article was blaming older versions of IE and not really IE itself. Microsoft is already limited in the OS’s they support with IE, but now they limit themselves even further by refusing to support XP with IE9 and IE10. They could have written the newer browsers to work in XP, but they chose not to. And IE10 will only work in WIndows 7 or 8. OK. Vista was a flop and should not be supported, but why not XP. I know they want to kill XP, but let’s get real XP is not dead and won’t be for a long time. So why not provide the latest browsers for XP and do a forced update. Then this would not even be an issue.

Again I say it is NOT IE that is the problem. It is the lack of support by Microsoft that is.

Mike on July 12th, 2012 at 12:29 pm

I agree and disagree. Whining is not counterproductive. It is whining and then refusing to put in more effort that is counterproductive. I will whine all I want about IE, because it’s way behind the modern browsers, not just in terms of CSS3, but also in HTML5 (take multiple file selection using a single file upload dialog window, fox example – that does not work even in IE9!). Personally speaking, I would not rant too much about IE’s lack of CSS support which makes things pretty. There’s workarounds that can get you that effect, usually in the old-school way, using something like background images (drop-shadow, for example). A 2px rounded corner won’t appear in IE, but it won’t make the box look ugly. It’s bigger things, that IE does not support, which irritate me, like the upload issue I mentioned earlier.

And yes, I believe it is the responsibility of developers to take the extra pain to implement features cross-browser, but I believe you can cut them some slack if they complain about things not being browser-compatible. And it’s not just about IE. Firefox and Chrome, for example, handle element positioning using position:relative differently. Chrome has this smartass habit of being forgiving at times, which means even though part of your CSS is not how it should be, it will still align elements in the supposedly desired fashion, while it is broken on the other browsers. It can make you want to tear your hair out if you find out that one of your elements is off in one of the browsers, and you have to modify a whole set of dimensions in your CSS file to get that issue fixed. We’re in the second decade of the new century already, and we’re still having browser issues. When will we have a world where things work according to a standard?

Debadeep on July 12th, 2012 at 1:10 pm

^ *I will whine all I want about IE, ….. , but I will also take the pain to implement the tiring workarounds. I missed the last part.

Debadeep on July 12th, 2012 at 1:12 pm

For what it’s worth, your article changed my mind. Regardless, I clicked on your link to where you work and the wellfurnished.com site gives my IE 8 a JavaScript error. Chrome works fine.

I’m confused now. Who should do the complaining? Me or you?
(grin)

Daniel Van Der Werken on July 12th, 2012 at 1:15 pm

@Daniel – thanks for the bug report. I’ll take a look at that.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 1:28 pm

I am a web user not a web developer (except where I am given no choice.) One theory of the purpose of web development, and the one that this article implicitly argues against, is that it provides interesting work for web developers and an exhilirating experience for the discerning (read more dollars than sense) user – Ars gratis Artis. My theory is that it promotes commercial communication. If an animated 3-D geegaw takes more than 5 or so seconds to load across DSL on a two or five year old computer using whichever version of IE is on that one (actually 8 on each), I go to another site that is more customer centric. (Chrome works better when I visit a few pages on one site, kill that and start another copy for the next site, but that is a pain for exploring a topic.)

KDLNeal on July 12th, 2012 at 3:38 pm

Internet Explorer 9 is a competent browser, for now, but arguing that we should just deal with IE8 would undermine the future of web services and technologies.

The rich competition in browsers is beautiful, however your insinuation that decrepit browsers – which aren’t actually competing, or even updating – are what make the web beautiful is very strange, to be frank.

I’m all about progressive enhancement, but when a majority of users are stuck on a browser that is 3-10, there’s little room for progression.

Your claim that we can’t change the circumstance is naive. Major sites are doing it every day by asking users of old browsers to upgrade, or strangely even taxing users of old browsers as Kogan recently started doing for IE6 customers.

None of this is about “woe is me,” it’s about “I want things to be better for clients and for users.”

Jamie Skella on July 12th, 2012 at 3:47 pm

PS. “a browser that is 3-10 years old,” I forgot that “years old” part.

Jamie Skella on July 12th, 2012 at 3:49 pm

@Jamie – you’re missing a couple of very important points. First, the overwhelming majority of users are using “modern” browsers. That includes Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 9+. Second, I’m all for promoting upgrading browsers but the fact is that everyone who is capable of upgrading already has. Those who are left are stock either because of their operating system or because of their technical ability. I worked at a major site and we promoted upgrading as well. It just doesn’t work that well.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 12th, 2012 at 3:54 pm

@Nicholas, you said:

“Second, I’m all for promoting upgrading browsers but the fact is that everyone who is capable of upgrading already has. Those who are left are stock either because of their operating system or because of their technical ability. I worked at a major site and we promoted upgrading as well. It just doesn’t work that well.”

If that’s the case, then there’s no harm in trying. There’s nothing wrong with raising awareness every once in a while. Lifehacker.com picked up on my 2nd browser article on SM, and they’ve republished it. That’s a good thing. You have no idea how many people are retweeting that 2nd article. If you wake up tomorrow and find out that as a result of this push, IE8 is no longer in use, then you’ll be thanking me. No, that’s not going to happen, but even if it puts a small dent in the numbers, it will be a good thing. And that’s the whole point.

Also, I think you’re way off when you say “everyone who is capable of upgrading already has”. That’s some pretty risky guess-work there. I’d say SM had everything to gain and nothing to lose from publishing those two articles this week.

To say that this is just IE bashing and (as someone else said) ‘developers complaining about our tools’ is nonsense. We’re trying to maximize the capabilities of the web platform, and that can only happen if all old browsers (including IE9) fall off the radar.

It amazes me that people think that wanting IE8 out of the picture is “old ways of thinking” when in fact the opposite is true: Wanting ancient browsers out of the picture is a new way of thinking, because we’re no longer thinking of the browsers, but the web as a platform.

Oh, and let’s clarify something here: Browsers and OS’s are not tools; they are the platform on which we deploy our tools. Modern developers want the web platform to dictate the extent to which we use our tools, the browsers should not dictate that (at least, not anymore).

Louis on July 12th, 2012 at 7:20 pm

As a dev that is often faced with creating features that work “on all browsers” I can vouch that IE8 and IE9 are a category apart. But so is Safari on the IPad or other browsers for mobiles and tablets. At one time I considered FireFox “the new Internet Explorer 6″ as the way it interpreted some web details was fundamentally different from Chrome, its close cousin.

I agree with the author that blaming Internet Explorer doesn’t help much except for venting steam, and that old paradigms, as in any field and even psychology, are baggage that holds us down. Internet Explorer is just very easy to criticize, that’s all, and we devs have a tendency to chose the easiest ways to do things.

At the same time I strongly disagree with

What makes the web beautiful is precisely that there are multiple browsers and, if you build things correctly, your sites and applications work in them all

. In my experience, building things correctly involves tons of extra work, not just for me, but for the poor testing teams that have to try out my feature on every little device that is en vogue at the moment, subject to the arbitrary and despotic restrictions on some of them. Unfortunately we do not have the luxury to say that a feature is correct, like a mathematical proof, and that if it doesn’t work it’s the browser fault. We work for businessmen and they want their clients to be happy.

So what Nicholas calls a beautiful web, I call cacophonous, a wasteful environment in which everything is a predator and you have to adapt to every one in the same time. It is Internet Explorer’s fault, as it is the fault of every browser out there. Face it: all browsers are failing us. Standards do not save us, as they are blatantly obsolete and misinterpret(able)ed, common sense or agreement doesn’t exist and divergence is law. We live, we fight and we die with a list of “supported browsers” as the only proof we were there.

Siderite on July 12th, 2012 at 9:22 pm

I’ve been saying that for years and I’ll keep saying it, Microsoft did the right thing to quash Netscape and rightly so to improve and advance the web. Without that browser war that went on, there was no way to get where we are today. Imagine if we had to traverse the DOM with the Netscape syntax – God, I’d quit developing as a web developer and moved on being a desktop support person!

If every vendor followed 100% of the W3C’s interpretation of CSS3 and HTML (whatever version you want) that would be the ideal thing. But nobody interprets the standard the way it is because it is not spelled out to everyone’s taste. So, different browsers will work with like 90% to 95% of the CSS3 and HTML standards. This is where javascript frameworks and javascript plugins like modernizer takes over and try to smooth out the differences between the browsers.

In the past, I’ve used IE as the ONLY browser to develop web apps and websites and because IE totally dominated the market, who cares about the other minute percentage – really? Nowadays, with other vendors being so similar and with everyone having their share of the market place, yeah, I use the 4 main browsers to test my web apps.

I think ppl just like to bitch about things no matter what it is. ppl like to especially bitch about the Microsoft because of their marketing practices, but yet they don’t have anything to do with that, but they just use that as an argument to justify their means to bitch about Microsoft. I developed in both Java and ASP.NET, but in the end, I just find that the tools Microsoft provided are some of the best and easy to use over my whole career. And the cool thing is, Microsoft doesn’t dictate how I need to program for the web to support different browsers. That’s up to me to decide if I want to support other browsers or just IE and that’s entirely up to the project and the ppl that are going to support it. This article hits it straight to the point – look at the big picture and look at what needs to be developed and what the business requirements are. Cut all the bull crap and politics out and see that each browser has its own benefits and drawbacks. At the end of the day, most browsers will do it’s job catered to most audiences.

Mr CSharp on July 12th, 2012 at 11:03 pm

Reading through these comments merely makes me question what everyone thinks their job actually entails?

If you’re an artist, then just tell users who don’t meet your operating requirements to go away and upgrade. You’re an artist, you’re allowed to be elitist.

If you’re being paid by someone to produce a site that is going to achieve business objectives that include things like “must be usable by everyone” then suck it up, educate the client that “sexy new features” aren’t going to be available to everyone, moderate their expectations and get on with the job. If you can get the client (and this includes the “Boss” as “Client”) to agree that there is a minimum entry requirement then, great, you can move on with a spring in your step. If you educate the client that to emulate or degrade the sexy features gracefully is going to cost x% more than either not including them or providing gatekeeper functionality then you’ve discharged your responsibility when they make their decision.

Sure, you can moan. Feel free. Moan about it in the same way as you moan about the fact that you pay tax or that you have asthma or something like that. It’s just one of those things you have to deal with.

In the final analysis, however, unless you are an “artist” in charge of your own destiny, you are merely a coding whore, working for hire and there to fulfil the customer’s desire. So, pull on that nurses uniform, bend over and smile!

Charles on July 13th, 2012 at 4:27 am

[...] “What makes the web beautiful is multiple browsers and, if you build things correctly, ” : via @notabene [...]

La veille du week-end (trente-quatrième) | LoïcG on July 13th, 2012 at 6:41 am

@Nicholas, the comparison with Apple is only half-right as Safari is only used for rendering the help or bits of ITunes. I agree with the basic point that OS vendors shouldn’t be in the browser making game. Google and Apple have both demonstrated the embrace and extend strategy that Microsoft employed with IE. Apple’s low-point was probably the browser sniffing for some CSS functions when they released the I-Pad.

I’ve just set up a new Windows 7 VM. It comes with IE 8 and IE 64-bit and they behave differently. As I’m doing this in part to help develop a test for a bug in IE’s handling of downloads from SSL sites, I’m going to continue to moan about it because Microsoft should fix the bug and stop adding cruft like “web-slices”.

IE 6 continues to be popular in Asia because of export restrictions which prevented 128-bit encryption in IE until a few years ago. The workaround was to use an IE-only Active X component. Sigh.

Fortunately, if IE’s market share continues to decline at it’s current rate the problem will go away for many of us and we can devote our moaning to the premature use of experimental features (the “webkit-” prefix problem).

Charlie Clark on July 13th, 2012 at 7:08 am

Kinda get your point, but the thing is, IE8 isn’t a “nice stable browser” it’s a buggy piece of rushware that only claims merit because it’s better than its terrible predecessors. It’s not really unfair to criticise the world’s largest software company for making one of the worst browsers available.

It wouldn’t be so bad if IE was just bad at rendering pages, and was thus making my life miserable. I am, after all, paid to develop cross browser. When IE is also letting people into my computer, as most versions since, well, 1, have, and when IE is also swallowing system resources on my machine too, in amounts twice as large as any other browser, the question is fairly asked, why does MS not just consider an alternative.

If they don’t want to commit the resources, then they could simple release Windows with a different browser, if they want more personalisation than that, then they could just work with one of the existing browser groups to make a personalised version of an existing good browser. It won’t happen, but that’s only because of Microsoft’s attitude, not because it’s impossible.

Owen Jones on July 13th, 2012 at 8:17 am

As technology evolves things get better and eventually old technology gets replaced with the new. I hear that IE 10 is going to be more on par with the web standards that Chrome and Firefox support.

John on July 13th, 2012 at 12:00 pm

@Owen Jones: with you 100%

Charlie Clark on July 13th, 2012 at 1:29 pm

@Owen – I have to say, I stand by my comments. In all of my web development these days I very rarely have significant issues working with Internet Explorer 8 or 9. Unless you work for Microsoft or have some quotes, saying that they have specific attitude isn’t a good argument. You don’t know what the attitude is. I can only comment on the actions that I see, and I’ve only seen improvements since Internet Explorer 7. Yes, they’re not all the way where we would like them to be, but we need to give some credit where credit is due.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 13th, 2012 at 1:39 pm

@Nicholas, you say that the majority of users are on modern browsers, but as of June 2012 approximately 50% of the world continue to use an IE browser, and less than 50% of IE users are using IE9 – the rest remain on IE8 or older.

Looking at first-hand situations, an overwhelming majority of the user base at Tatts.com, a website I work on inside Australia’s top 100 that has hundreds of thousands of active users, are still using IE7 and IE8.

Jamie Skella on July 13th, 2012 at 7:25 pm

@Jamie – Grouping all IEs together is unfair and impractical. Here are the latest numbers from StatCounter: Chrome (27%), IE9 (16.5%), Firefox (24.6%), Safari (7%). By my math, that’s 75% of users that are using modern, more-than-capable browsers. Individual sites will vary, of course, but globally this is the trend.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 13th, 2012 at 7:51 pm

I’ve always found the “old” browsers to be a double-edged sword. Yes, it is incredibly frustrating to massage them into compliance. On the other hand, that is exactly why front end engineers are so in demand….and get paid the big bucks. We have the know-how and patience to do it!

Sarah Clatterbuck on July 13th, 2012 at 9:59 pm

@Nicholas, I grouped them together, and then explained that IE9 occupies less than half of IE’s 50%. We’ve both just explained that a quarter of the world’s browser population is obsolete and less-than-capable.

I suppose the positon of difference is that despite being a majority, three of every four isn’t something I’m celebrating. Perhaps when it’s nine of every ten.

Jamie Skella on July 14th, 2012 at 6:29 am

Great article Nicolas. Thought provoking, intelligent and correct. Keep up the good fight. A breath of fresh air in the IT community.

Joel on July 14th, 2012 at 6:32 am

My very personal opinion is that whoever uses an outdated browser deserves to suffer. I am well aware that using techniques like XHTML Strict can serve well to create websites which work down to IE6 on markup level, and that frameworks like jQuery can work wonders. And if you have to support a client who is stuck with an old IE version, well, then you just have to live through this or look for another job. There always will be somebody who will supports older browsers, same as there will be garages which support old cars.

There would not be a discussion like this if a world company like Microsoft had done a better job in the past, and if they struggle now a bit longer then I think that this is only fair.

Progress also means leaving things behind.

Ralf on July 14th, 2012 at 10:54 pm

Worse thing about supporting all these IEs is having to run 4 instances of Windows just to do some testing. IE9′s development tools don’t render accurately. The whole thing is mess.

Fred on July 15th, 2012 at 5:08 am

All the counter arguments are missing the point. It doesn’t matter which browsers suck because the browsers are in use by visitors to the sites you are coding everyday. The fact that you think IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Mosaic or anything else sucks doesn’t matter.

Until you become total ruler of the universe and are able to outlaw all browsers, operating systems, processors, programming languages, political affiliations, hygiene habits, religious beliefs or anything else you don’t like someone doing you are just whining about what you can’t control.

If they can’t see it, they can’t consume it (buy it, download it, reply to it, etc.). Nothing matters but that.

Joe Stockton on July 15th, 2012 at 1:56 pm

Its really sad to limit this discussion to the developers. What about the CLIENTS and USERS. Yes the client will have to pay more to support IE8 down to IE6 depending on her needs to target USERS OF XP as well. But I bet she would be glad if she could pay not a penny more for this mess. Why pay more? Because a giant company doesn’t want to support xp with the latest IE like its A BIG DEAL.

Let Microsoft support xp with FORCED upgrades to IE9 and above and
1.) save more developers from IE SPECIFIC headaches and JavaScript hacks which in turn will make
2.) their clients happy for not having to pay more for all round FEATURE richness and in turn will
3.) make users who don’t have to make an unnecessary upgrade FROM XP and present hardware JUST because of IE.

Microsoft MIGHT be running away from cost of security which IE9 and above might pose if back-ported to XP so they let the developers deal with it.

I think developers should convincingly advice most of their clients and force users to drop IE6 through IE8 or even IE9 and go for better free browsers with add-on interface that gives them the feel like IE then let Microsoft deal with it.

Owolabi on July 15th, 2012 at 4:49 pm

[...] It’s time to stop blaming Internet Explorer Filed under: News & Reviews, Web Design Tweet [...]

Pixel Acres » Blog Archive » Convincing users to abandon IE is like whistling in the wind on July 15th, 2012 at 8:15 pm

I blame all the old IE(6,7,8) for that post but IE9 is best and even it’s JavaScript engine is faster than other browser engine’s (especially for canvas rendering).

Madhu Rakhal Magar on July 15th, 2012 at 8:53 pm

@Nicholas The fact that these articles and contra-articles exist is proof enough lots of time is being wasted on stuff that “should work”. It didn’t 6 years ago, and it won’t behaving now. Move on and those who won’t .. too bad. They’re missing out.

If u browse my site on a 6yr old phone, you won’t see colorful graphics either. Because your phone is too old. Everyone accepts that. However, updating your browser (for FREE!) is all of a sudden an undertaking people aren’t willing to do ??

If lots of people weren’t complaining and pushing users to upgrade, we wouldn’t even have decent IE’s..

The only thing oldIE is good for is job security, ie. those hourse cursing and guessing how to hack valid code to make it do something in the browser what it should do from the beginning.

Tom Hermans on July 16th, 2012 at 3:14 am

@Ralf – I hear people say that a lot, yet would you actually stand in front of the client and say the same thing? “I’m sorry, you’re using an older browser, you deserve to suffer?” In reality, it doesn’t make sense to punish users who are willing to give you money.

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 16th, 2012 at 9:00 am

I have to agree with the author. IE sucks, it’s behind, and probably always will be. But it’s all about the mobile now. As a developer, my focus is now Javascript/HTML5. It’s been out for years, and demands usage in a cross-platform fashion. I’m all for posting messages to IE users that simply state, “Your browser sucks, we don’t support it, here are some better alternatives:”.

’nuff said.

Craig on July 16th, 2012 at 9:38 am

Internet Explorer would never be used by anyone if it did not come with every Windows installation. I am a web developer. ,and I do CSS, HTML5/javascript and some PHP. and of all the Browsers I have programmed for, Internet Explorer requires the most work to get any type of program beyond a basic Web Page going. Its level of HTML5 support is laughable at best. People tend to get that football team mentality going when talkin about their favorite programs. the” MINE IS BETTER THAN YOURS”friday night Team rant”. Look,I use them all (browsers), Firefox,Opera,Chrome, Firefox with Game Controller API, for various reasons, except IE. I blocked it from accessing the internet with the firewall, that I bought, the Built in firewall in windows also blows. Look, I understand why people like IE, its there, you click it, you’re on QVC, EBAY, or some other site, but for anything over than surfing, its a dog. Sorry , but it is.

ken on July 16th, 2012 at 11:50 am

Just came across this (I know, one of gazillions) threads..
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3413629/emulate-ie7-for-ie8-but-not-for-ie9-using-x-ua-compatible

Says it all..

Tom Hermans on July 18th, 2012 at 3:02 am

[...] [00:12:40] It’s time to stop blaming Internet Explorer [...]

Revision 80: X-Tag, Print Styles und IE-Basher bashen | Working Draft on July 18th, 2012 at 5:05 am

The culture of complaint is ubiquitous (and annoying) in our culture at large, but I’m not sure complaining about it does any good.

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Seriously tho, the problem for me is time. I’m given x amount of time to develop something, and I need support IE 7 (or even 6). I would love to use new coding methods, and I try to when I can, but if time is limited, and it almost always is, I end up developing with IE 7 in mind (using images etc.). I do think the way forward is to start embracing that everything doesn’t have to look exactly the same as long as UX isn’t drastically altered, and I do think this attitude is becoming more prevalent.

Ryan Tainter on July 20th, 2012 at 6:28 am

While I can agree that negative tech bashing can be annoying, especially when repeated, and propagated by ignorant fan boys/girls, there are good, if not great reasons to still despise IE.

My two biggest issues with IE 9:

1. IE9 was marketed as being rebuilt from the ground up to support HTML5. The marketing was stretched to the point where IE 9 was labelled to be “Native HTML5″. Given this aggressive, and incorrect marketing, deserves to be bashed.

2. IE9 still cannot accurately determine what mode to render pages. I can take a w3c validated page with no scripts, and still elicit a “quirks mode” response. Heaven forbid IE respect DOCTYPEs. Not only was MS the first company to make browser strings useless, they’ve taken it a step further, and made doctypes useless.

Michael Bennett on July 21st, 2012 at 10:58 am

@Michael – I don’t see either of those as major issues. You can’t fault engineers for what marketers say. Also, I haven’t had any trouble with IE 9 choosing which mode to render in. Most of the issues I’ve seen have been related to people manually overriding rather than something the browser did on its own. It sounds mostly like you’re just still looking for a reason to hate 99 rather than giving it a chance. They’re equally annoying things with other browsers (Firefox rendering buttons larger than other browsers, Chrome calculating line height differently, etc.).

Nicholas C. Zakas on July 23rd, 2012 at 9:22 am

To the author,
I just want to say thank you. Thank you for, in my mind, being a voice of reason in what is a near-pointless argument. Regardless of what browser developers (like myself) claim is the end-all-be-all experience, it is ultimately irrelevant. WE build for the CONSUMER and it’s time we as a community acknowledge that. This is not a browser problem; this is an attitude problem…and I’m glad to know I’m not alone in that assessment.

Kayla on July 23rd, 2012 at 9:55 pm

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