Judson Collier

Yep. Almost six years ago, when I first got into the web business, I started questioning IEs abilities. Soon afterwards I said IE is the worst browser on the planet. Nothing since then has changed my opinion of it and, it seems, most of the developer world feels the same way.

How many hours were wasted trying to make websites compatible with IE? If IE wasn’t in the way, the “web” industry would be years ahead.

I wonder if you could explain why I, as a user of the internet, rather than as a web developer, should care? Is there anything essentially useful that users of IEx are missing out on due to the functionality MS fail on in the acid3 test?

He-he, I am so glad I can afford not to take IE into account. My site is even explicit about that (just go to my homepage with IE).

@anounandaverb: You will miss very few things, because the market share of IE basically forces web masters to make an IE compliant web site.

However, this prevents cool things like Flash-free video streaming. (Which is a great way to hamper the adoption of free software, by the way.)

@anounandaverb: No, you’re probably not missing out for the reasons Loup has mentioned. 

Why IE (especially v6 and v7) is causing headaches for web developers is that they are required to spend excessive amounts of time making their websites compatible with these browsers.  Generally, when designing a website, you can write code once and it’ll work almost perfectly in everything except IE, even browsers 4 years old; then you have to spend more time fixing/hacking it to work properly in IE6/7.

This means that developers may have to compromise on modern features such as transparent PNGs, CSS3 and HTML5, to make their sites compatible.  Also they are having to sacrifice either their own or their client’s time, therefore increasing the cost of their work.  If IE 6 and 7 just didn’t exist, we would probably gain about 20% more time to concentrate on other work.

@anounandaverb -Here is the reason you as a layman care:

If a web developer has 100 hrs to spend building a website, a certain percentage is WASTED because they have to go in test compatibility with IE6, 7 & 8 and fix the weird bugs they have.

In addition, the process of going through this drains the energy out of a developer through frustration & aggravation, which means the entire project might suffer. Happy developer = better experience for you.

Being standards compliant means that web technologies that could dramatically improve the productivity of developers also goes up. For example, CSS is an awesome technology that really makes a web designer feel like a ninja. You change a few things and the entire website is changed. “Look ma, no hands!”

For these reasons and more, you want to use FireFox or Chrome and tell ALL your friends and coworkers to switch as well. The only reason Microsoft is starting to care about standards is because FireFox has been kicking their but for a few years.

@anounandaverb: Because web developers must spend so much time working around IE’s faults, it significantly adds to the time to market, and therefore cost of development, of just about every site on the web.

These added costs factor into the overall technical budget of a company, which are then passed on to a user/consumer in some way (whether it be through higher margin on products or higher fees associated with a site membership).

Additionally, you’re missing out on some really cool technology and an overall better experience because developers are forced to ignore new, exciting technologies in order to simply make their site work in IE.

As Olivier said, we would be years ahead of where we currently are if it weren’t for the need to support IE.

Thanks for all the responses. I should perhaps make my position a little clearer; I work as a developer, although I am not, and never have been a web developer. I stopped using IE in favour of Phoenix (those were the days) and I now use both Chrome and Firefox (I’d like to use just Chrome but it gets itself in a state a little too often..) and I’m very aware of the usefulness and importance of standards.

From a brief skimming of the Google results for acid3, it seems I’m not going to find a simple explanation of what exactly it is that means that IE only gets 32%. But the point I’m trying to make is that if they get a low score because they don’t support some of the things on the acid3 site (http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/) like CSS3 colors and downloadable web fonts, then I don’t really care - the web isn’t going to get fundamentally better when this site can download font X to my browser so that the owner can bask in the warm glow of knowing his text is being read in the ‘right’ font.

I don’t dispute the fact that non-flash streaming video and some of the other things mentioned in responses would be a good thing - but is that what acid3 is testing? Somewhere in those colorful squares is it testing video? I wish I could tell.

I agree that supporting IE must slow web developers down. The only philosophical point I’d make about that is that in reality I wouldn’t be surprised if some (if not all) the time saved would instead be used for ‘polishing’ of the UI. Extra hours spent agonising over whether you’ve used just the right shade of green, whether the gaps between text fields should be slightly smaller… [This isn’t a dig at web developers, I’m more than guilty of this habit; if an app needs to be ready in two weeks and it’s done in a week and a half it’s a battle to not sit there for another few days thinking, “well, I’ll just refactor this one class because then it’ll be much cleaner”, or “it’d be really cool if the table rows could turn bold for a few seconds after the data changes”. All those things technically make the product better, but we don’t do them for the user, we do it because that’s the fun part of the job..]

@anounandaverb Working with actual clients, I know that they get very particular about things like you mentioned - and rightly so. I’m not going to go into why they are, (customer experience, corporate profile etc), but the point is they are.

The reason Web Developers and Web Designers agonise over UI and colours is because their Clients agonise over UI and colours.

But those things are not taking time - Experienced designers etc _know_ what shade of green to use and how to create a polished UI.

Most of the time spent is actually on making websites which work perfectly well (without css hackery) on browsers, such as Firefox and Chrome, to work on IEx.

We can go through specific and simple examples, but the point this post is making, or at least as I understand it, is that it seems as if MS is (again) not taking standards compliance seriously - and they should!

I can commiserate with all the IE-related angst.  Still, do websites need to look the same in every browser? 

http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

I don’t find myself spending excessive amounts of time on making sites functional in IE; I have spent excessive amounts of time making them look exactly the same, and this is time misspent, frankly.  It’s not worth it, and nobody but OCD designers like us even care.

When Microsoft published the IE 9 ACID numbers, the point was that they had gained 10 points in the few weeks during which the project had been going on. They very vocally said they were just in the beginning and admitted that there’s a lot more to work on. The blog post you based this on didn’t try to hide this.

I agree Microsoft’s work on web standards has sucked, but you have no idea on what IE 9’s final score is going to be. Of course, drama brings you readers, but the fact remains that you totally failed to reflect the state of the product you were reviewing. It’s not even “beta” as you mentioned.

Naturally, I join you all in wishing that IE 9 final’s ACID numbers would be far better than the last-published 32.