Carlos de la Guardia writes in his blog about his most recent misadventures with Internet Explorer and his post proves once again that confusion, frustration and anger are the emotions most commonly associated with MSIE.
I say let’s just put that damn browser to sleep.
No, seriously. What would happen if we developers just revolted and refused to support MSIE with all kinds of crude JS, CSS and pseudo-HTML hacks that will break anyway when Microsoft starts pushing a new MSIE flavor? Imagine a world in which digg, slashdot, Google, and even Amazon received people with broken browsers with a nice “optimized for Mozilla Firefox” button or -better yet- with a full-page “go get a real browser” error page listing 40 alternative browsers. Considering that Firefox already has some serious market share and is heading for more we may be able to pull it off. Heck, I bet that MSIE would be standards compliant within a week. Or they could just take Gecko and wrap a nice Vista skin around it and call it MSIE 7.1 for all I care. The point is that most of us could be back home in time for dinner for a change.
Hardly original, I know. But this may be worth the effort of fighting a war.
[tags]Mozilla,Firefox,MSIE,BrowserWars[/tags]
2 thoughts on “Death to MSIE!”
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I really had high hopes for IE7, and now I find myself making a separate CSS file for IE6 (as I used too), plus a new one for IE7… Don’t you just hate them. Even when they “improve” their products they manage to make things worse for you…
Unfortunately unless you want obnoxious calls from your client asking “why is the website not working on my computer?”, I think Firefox needs to achieve “critical mass” before we can all dump IE for good.
A good way of helping is this: most web developers (or any technical person) ends up doing tech support for friend, family, and the always broken “family pc”. This is what I do whenever someone asks me for help:
I take a look at their computer (which even before I turn it on, I know the problem is spyware and viruses) and say:
Do not use IE. IE is the devil. That’s how you get spyware and viruses in your computer (which is true). Then I proceed to show them how to download firefox, install it. I explain how it works the same but 10,000 times more secure.
For really stubborn people I change the path on the IE icons to point to Firefox.
I’ve been doing this for over a year, and everyone I’ve done this for is really grateful. I’ve even heard a couple of them recommend Firefox to their friends “because IE is a piece of crap” :) As an added bonus, the rate of support requests I get from them has dropped to virtually *zero*.