IE Again…

Posted by leepeng on April 28, 2010

There is always a voice to phase out IE totally due to its poor compliant to W3C standard. I as a developer also hope this can happen one day or IE will one day FULLY compliant with standard.

However, when I think deeper, this might not happen overnight due to historical reason.

In the late 90s, when IE4 released, it almost wipe through the entire Internet world with the “revolutionary browser” that build in to MS Windows.
At that time, both Apple and Netscape are at the borderline of bankruptcy.
Almost all PCs in the world are with IE4.
In that time, W3C had just setup and they struggled to fight with the giant which had its own “standard”
Microsoft had its development tools, back office server families which do not subject web standard (as there were no standard, MS became its own standard)
In addition, developers at that time developed websites and sometime Java Applets / ActiveX that runs on IE as that was the user base. (During that time, we write code on IE and test on Netscape)

What I must say is, Microsoft carried too much baggage while trying to move forward in the browser environment.
Too much backward compatibility issues to cater for its users based that they established during the “golden era”
They cannot afford to do a total switch to Gecko or WebKit engine. I believe this is not just purely corporate image, but they have to put a lot of consideration of their user base.
[Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines]

The world has changed now which the competitors bloomed with web standard straight at the beginning.
And we developers love web standard.
We love Firefox, Chrome, Safari. (I believe non of Foreceptian has IE as default browser)
As technologist, we chase for new standards and features like HTML5 and CSS3. They can make the world better.

However, lets see from this perspective…
Forecepts is a company that provide professional web service.
We have clients who are technology fanatics and who very familiar with web 2.0 technology. This group of people will have 0% resistant from compliant to modern browser.
We also have clients who from the corporate, who carried the same heavy baggage like MS. (or who has poor MIS department)

I believe we are at transition period. MS is receiving heavy market pressure in the browser industry and they have no choice but to change before it been phase out totally.
As web servicing company, I believe our current position is to continue to educate our clients and provide the correct consultation (for example advise them to install Firefox if they can’t upgrade their IE due need to access legacy system); and with some endurance.

I have a dream, that one day I will see our programmers been judged by quality of business logic and great usability; not by if the code is compatible across browsers. As all browsers are compliant to 1 standard