It’s time to banish Internet Explorer

IE sucks!

IE has had an awful reputation. To put it in a simpler language, IE sucks – well, it doesn’t just suck, it sucks badly! In negative terms, it’s slow; it’s vulnerable; it’s outdated. In positive terms, it has more weird attributes, more bugs (IE is probably the father of  the term “CSS hacks“), more usability issues (in its UI). The dead of IE 6 (in reality, Microsoft will continue to support it until 2014) and the emergence of IE9 have made life a bit easier. But IE7 and IE8 are still pretty much out there while IE9, albeit better, still sucks. I’m not here to explain all over again why IE sucks in various aspects since there are tons of articles and even blogs, websites dedicated to that. The fact is the dead of any version of IE is really a milestone in web development. We look forward to say good bye to them – one by one although it’s still far away.

One of, if not arguably the main reason why IE can still survive is because there are still many people using it. For example, there are still 2,7% 1.0 and 1,6% 0.5% of  Vietnamese and Singaporean respectively using IE6 at the moment. What a shame! People just simply don’t know or don’t bother to upgrade, let alone to change, their beloved web browser! If only tens and even hundreds of folks do, never mind; but when thousands and even millions of them do, it becomes a big problem.


This shows how awesome IE is!

It’s so frustrating. My website looks and runs perfectly fine in every single browser that has ever existed, except for Internet Explorer!!!”

Lame, just lame. I’m not even going to bother with this anymore. The only reason why I’m using it right now is to check the compatibility of my website.

Undoubtedly, developers are the ones who suffers most from IEs

But who’s to blame?

Developers are complaining here and there. But they can’t do anything much about it simply because their companies will still continue to support cross-browser compatibility to avoid losing their clients and revenue. So as long as clients still use IE which they do and will, companies and agencies still have to support it, and therefore, web developers still have to suffer the horror of developing and “hacking” codes for IE (If you are an IE user who can see some cool HTML5′ and CSS3′ effects working on your beloved browsers, you should know that it’s not as straight forward as it seems. Developers have to put a lot more efforts just to satisfy your experience in your outdated browsers. Sometimes, it may take up to 40% of the entire developing time just for testing, debugging and hacking for IEs). It’s a vicious circle but who’s to blame?

For business owners, it’s not really their faults, it’s due to business reasons. For clients, it’s not really their faults because it’s their money anyway. They have their rights to be stubborn and demanding. For those who don’t bother to upgrade or change their ancient browsers, it’s not really their faults either because ignorance just seems inevitable. Well, this is all Microsoft’s fault for packaging it with Windows! Its monopoly has lived on to haunt us for probably decades. But Microsoft (and its Windows) is still standing strong and there are no signs that the monopoly would stop any time soon. So, in order to improve the situation, someone must really do something!!

Just do something

Alright, from now onwards I personally pioneer (!?) to stop supporting IE in this website as well as in almost all all Huu Thinh House’s upcoming web projects! If they happen to work in IE, thanks God, it’s a miracle! Big Smile I highly encourage you to do the same especially when it comes to personal and non-commercial blog and websites. Let’s eliminate the worst for a better world and let Web developers have more times to build cooler web apps instead of debugging and hacking codes for IEs!

ps: As of now, I still include IE’s prefix (-ms) into my codes whenever possible, which will pontentially support the later versions of IEs. But if IE 10 still sucks (not just better anymore) which I highly suspect, there are no more hopes for IE, Microsoft and those who are and will still be using it.

Sunday, October 7, 2012 around 7am
Monday, November 25, 2013 around 5pm
Posted in Programming. If you like it, show some

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