Please don’t use Internet Explorer

It’s not just that it’s by Micro$oft. It’s that it’s not standards compliant. A little bit of history:

When the web first started to use browsers (Netscape, Internet Explorer, etc.), folks weren’t quite sure how to write the code so it would display “correctly” on every browser. Slowly, standards were developed, with the goal of writing HTML and other web code so every browser would display each web page similarly (if not identically).

However, Microsoft continues to build its browser in non-standards compliant ways. One quote:

Microsoft has seen fit to engineer their browser to deliberately violate the standards in several critical ways. It might just be a mis-guided attempt to “make it simple” for newbie coders, or it might be a cynical ploy to crush the competition, but in any case it creates huge headaches for those of us who desire to employ CSS positioning on our pages. (www.positioniseverything.net/ie-primer.html)

Alternates to Internet Explorer, browsers that are standards compliant, include Firefox and Opera, plus Safari on the Mac (there are several other standards compliant browsers, but these three are the big ones). All of these browsers are free. Firefox is “Open Source” software, which means that lots of people all over the world are constantly testing and upgrading the code. The Open source movement is an amazing testimony to the power of cooperation.

OK, back to Internet Explorer (or IE as it’s often called). The problem is that a web designer has to write standards compliant web pages for the “other” browsers, then check it with IE, then tweak it so it works with IE. Those of us who design web pages know we have to do this, because so many people are using IE. As long as you keep using it, web designers will have to work twice as hard.

So, why do people use IE?

IE comes on all Window$ machines, so most folks just go ahead and use it.
Some sites require IE (e.g. I watch Netflix instant movies, and you cannot use other browsers).

So, realistically, even if you switch to another browser, you’ll need to keep IE on your machine for those occasional web sites that don’t display well with other browsers. If you use Firefox, there’s even an extension that will allow you to remember which pages need IE, and when you surf to them IE will automatically open.

Unfortunately, most folks just want to use what’s on their machine, and not have to worry about all this ‘computer stuff.” That’s what Micro$soft is betting on. As the old saying about the phone company went, “We don’t care, we don’t have to.”