What’s up with Internet Explorer. We have the W3C World Wide Web Consortium and we even have validator services now. Yes HTML and CSS have come a very long way, but for a major company like Microsoft I really don’t understand why its so hard to play ball with the rest of the team.
I know I can’t be the only one who feels this way, or is tired of creating wonderful designs, only to discover the design works great in every browser BUT Internet Explorer. This has been a Microsoft problem from the beginning. They expect the whole world to bend over backwards for Microsoft and play ball by their rules.Even with the W3C as a guideline for the rest of us, Microsoft expects us to write special code just for their products. Yes, it can be fixed by creating a special style sheet just for the IE browser, but really ! Is this what we should be doing ?
Maybe if enough designers and web surfers alike demand Microsoft play ball with the rest of us, then they will indeed change. As a designer maybe we should charge extra for the IE style sheet. As a surfer refuse to use IE products. As designers we can place the W3C validation button on the bottom of every page, and add a link that says if this page isn’t loading correctly download a browser that meets the W3C standard with a link to Chrome or a Mozilla product.
This topic especially hits home with me because I don’t use any Microsoft products. I test my pages in Chrome, Firefox and Konqueror and they always look so much better than in I.E. When I try something new, I’ll also test on a friends Mac Book and their browsers. Although this is really nothing more than a rant, I would love to see an organized Internet campaign to push people away from IE products or at least help Microsoft realize the error of their ways.
The good news is, the times they are a changing. When I look at at my server stats now, compared to server stats from ten years ago, the majority of users are using better browsers, and IE products seem to account for about 20 to 30 percent of my users browsers. Compared to ten years ago when Microsoft still had about a 70% market share of browser traffic. You would think they would start getting the hint. Maybe, with a little push from all of us, we can get that number down to a little less than 10% and not only get Microsoft to play fair, but also educate web surfers, and customers alike on the W3C HTML CSS standards.
If You Use Internet Explorer See The Difference For Yourself