paulgruberman said:
From a web dev standpoint, needing to add extra code so the site works for IE (yes, even the latest version) is a constant, needless waste of time. Things look fine on the viewer's end because web devs are taking the hits for you.
This pretty much sums it up.
XMark said:
IE6 = Cancer upon the internet. A shambling corpse that barely even resembles a real web browser. Very nearly dead everywhere except China but still cannot be completely ignored.
IE7 = It's like IE6 with a few errors haphazardly fixed with duct tape, but still waaaaaay behind on web standards, and has its own weird set of deviations from the standard. Frustratingly only about half as dead as IE6.
IE8 = Marginally acceptable browser for most pre-HTML5/CSS3 purposes. However, its place as the most popular current browser is seriously holding back the evolution of the web, and IE8 is going to take freaking forever to die. In about two years, IE8 will be the sworn arch-enemy of web developers world-wide. We will be cursing its presence until the last XP computer crashes to its final bluescreen.
IE9 = Microsoft finally joining the HTML5 club, but with a really half-assed effort that was a year or two behind the other browsers. Lots of HTML5 and CSS3 features are missing. Most annoyingly the text field placeholder attribute.
IE10 and 11 are actually pretty decent though, they've almost caught up with the rest of 'em. Almost.
This expands well on the concept.
OlasDAlmighty said:
Dead Century said:
I just did a fresh install of Windows on my old netbook. Let me put it this way: It's the browser you use to download another browser, and then never touch again.
Ah yes, I was wondering how many posts it would take before this old joke popped up, turns out the answer was 3.
The question I'm asking is
why? is it important to get another browser and never touch IE again? You haven't proven or explained your point and it's statements like this that made me want to create this thread in the first place.
Look at that list just above. IE6-8 were just bad an IE9 was better (technically, IE 7 was better than IE 6...but using that would would imply it's actually an improvement when it wasn't). Now, IE10-11 are alright-ish, and let's for the sake of the argument, say they are equivalent to other browsers in terms of users. It took
10 years for this to happen. During the entire time, other browsers lead the way, IE didn't even follow for the most part. It's the way Microsoft does things - they don't want to be part of a group, so a lot of the times that hurts them and the users. Maybe they've changed their mind about IE - I don't know, but if past trend holds, then perhaps one day other browsers will make an advancement that won't catch up with IE for years. What would be the reason to risk that is the better question?
OlasDAlmighty said:
I've stuck my head into HTML before, and while there were discrepancies between how things were rendered in IE, there were also discrepancies between Firefox and Chrome as well. I don't know the details of why this happens, but as far as I can tell, if you want to make sure your page is compatible, you have to test it out on all the browsers anyway.
If you write valid HTML/CSS, chances are the differences between browsers would be either very small or none at all. I don't think I've seen that many discrepancies that would require fudging the code/stylesheet to equalize - there were just a handful of occurrences as far as I recall, and even then, probably half were born out of lightly invalid code.
Now, I'll be honest - I've not done web development for a while now, so I've had little experience with IE9 and none with 10 and 11. Still, I can give you a shining example of IE's advancement in action:
As I said, I've seen very little of IE9 - from what I saw it was
actually standardized.
Including the JavaScript. Also, it offered some nifty web developer options, like a built-in JS debugger. Anyway, I had a sum total of 15-20 minutes with it. And here's is the "best" thing I found out about it - it
still managed to break code. This time because it was up to standards. I mean it - one JavaScript plugin broke, because it had a bunch of places in the code where it would do "if it's IE - here is the code, for all other browser - here is the actual code". And since it was supposed to work with older IE versions, the code was broken in the new one. Backwards compatibility - what's that?! It's also another example of how Microsoft operates - they just release stuff, everybody else is responsible for dealing with them. So again the question - why would you want that?
OlasDAlmighty said:
I will grant you that it's dumb the way you can't uninstall IE from Windows, that is bullshit and no program, good or bad should work like that.
You can uninstall it [http://www.wikihow.com/Uninstall-Internet-Explorer-Completely]. Erm, more or less - you can at least attempt it
Warnings
*You will only be able to get Internet Explorer back by reinstalling it from the Microsoft website now. Hence why you need to make sure you have another browser, if you don't and you uninstall Internet Explorer its going to be hard to recover.
*In some cases, your computer might just rollback to an older version. Sadly, some computers won't completely uninstall Internet Explorer, just dispose of your current version.
OlasDAlmighty said:
But at least you're not being forced to use it. You're still free to install the browser of your choice and set it as the default, so it seems like kinda a petty thing to get angry over.
Actually...no - sometimes you are forced to use it. Welcome to corporate environment. In fact, the reason IE6 was as widely used before wasn't because people just loved it so much - a lot of organisations
had to use it. That's a big part of it's userbase - people who are forced to use it. So, no - you are also wrong on this account - sometimes you are forced to use IE.