Everyone who has designed a website knows about the hassles related to Internet Explorer. Now on IEblog.com Microsoft is doing some advertising for it’s upcoming new version of IE – IE 9. One “feature” is that it shall be even more standard compliant, and it shall support rounded corners in CSS3. Which is nice – because I have used rounded corners and gradients on my web page.
It is interesting to follow the discussion on the ieblog which is oh-so-long. Which is not so weird. IE is of great concern for web developers. We have to code for it so that the website looks correct even in IE6 – which really is making us go mad. Many times I have spent hours and hours to make the website work in IE6 – both HTML, CSS and Javascript wize.
It is more than annoying to say the least.
One suggestion that comes up in the comments is for Microsoft to move Trident out of IE and in stead start using Webkit. We all know that’s not going to happen. And there are a few reasons for this:
- Trident is Microsofts own rendering engine and is used not only in Internet Explorer, but also in other applications – not only from MS. Since we also know that IE is tightly connected to the OS, Trident is most likely used in other applications – like for instance Explorer.
- Because the IE is so tightly connected to the Operating System they can’t change the rendering engine. It will take up a lot of resources, time and effort to make changes in the OS and then in a lot of MS applications that it won’t make sense.
- MS don’t really want to follow web standards. They will invent in order to fix problems at hand in the Operating System which isn’t really Web related.
- MS has spent much time and effort on the rendering engine. And since they want to say that they have won the Internet (according to Steve Ballmer, source not found (yet)), they don’t want to give in.
I really wish that IE could be decoupled with the OS. It would mean that I – as a Linux user – could download and install IE-X on my Linux Laptop to test out the site on the crippled browser. Now I have to run Windows in a Virtual Machine just to make sure that it works properly. And not only do I have to have a VM. I also need to have multiple versions of Internet Explorer running on the installation as well. This so that I can be sure that it works “perfectly” on IE6, IE7 and IE8 (and soon IE9).
I am not sure I want to go down that route.
One thing I am sure of is that I am not supporting IE6. That browser is as old as the dark ages, and less people are using it. As more and more people are moving to Vista and Win7 IE6 will fade and hopefully it will be gone.
And hopefully in 2010 we will have a MS-browser that supports CSS3, CSS2.1 and HTML4 and HTML 5.
I do hope that MS keeps on being innovative. But I hope they do this participating with the Web development community and not against them.
