Today I read a nice interview with Ryan Johnson of Control Suite fame. During the interview he was asked what the biggest challenges were. The answer was:
Internet Explorer. The only debate about the IE debacle that should be going on is whether the product is a result of incompetence or was designed deliberately to sabotage the development of complex web applications. They got XHR and the mouseenter/mouseleave events right, but that is about it.
And so I though: Why not debate it. Because I have had my share of troubles with the browser from the company in Redmond.
Yes. I am a Firefox user. I use Firefox every day to test my website(s) on and also, because I am not on a Windows PC (I’m using Ubuntu Linux) I can’t test the sites on IE during development. I test it later in the process. I should not do this, because (bad) experiences (should have) has told me that whatever works in Firefox does not work in IE.
Does this annoy me? You bet. It annoys the living crap out of me. What annoys me more is that because IE is the most used browser – because it comes so heavily integrated into Windows, and therefor cannot be uninstalled – what most people think is the web standard, is really MS messing it all up to change the standard to how they think it should be done.
I would hope that web developers would stand up and send letters (or any other type of communication) to MS telling them to obey the ECMA Javascript standard and also the HTML-standards.
Hopefully that would make our lives as web developers a bit easier than it is today.
