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Mu-Sly

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Internet Explorer 7.0 announced, but it's little comfort to us web developers : articles

Internet Explorer 7.0 announced, but it's little comfort to us web developers

Posted Wednesday 16th February 2005

So, Microsoft have finally woken up and announced Internet Explorer 7.0, apparently due for beta release on Windows XP this summer. Well "whoopee f-ing doo", because it's not going to heal the wounds caused by it's ancestors just yet.

As a serious web standards practitioner, I've seen this crap situation coming for a long time.

Don't get me wrong, I will be over the moon if IE7 has correct CSS support, PNG alpha transparency and so on, but the fact is that it makes hardly any difference to us standards-compliant web developers.

Even after IE7 comes out, we'll still be stuck with coding for IE6's massive userbase, and most likely still IE5 for sometime as well. There are plenty of people running older versions of Windows who this update will not support, and while Microsoft would obviously like to sell them the latest Windows version, in plenty of cases (users with older machines, businesses who won't upgrade a whole operating system just to get a decent browser - and why should they?) the upgrade just isn't going to happen. We are well and truly stuck with at least Internet Explorer 6, forever. ("Forever" in Internet technology terms means anything upwards of five years.)

Thankfully people don't seem to use IE4 any more, but I still spend probably an extra 30-50% of my page template development time breaking my perfectly good standards compliant CSS to suit IE's half-baked implementation. Goodness only knows how much extra wasted development time IE has cost me since the start of my career, but it's far beyond weeks and certainly into months by now.

I have a good mind to send Microsoft an invoice for that chunk of life I've wasted because of being forced to deal with their sub-standard products just to put food on the table. My web development time on each project would drop considerably if it wasn't for Internet Explorer's failings, which in turn would allow me to make more websites in a shorter amount of time, and pass the savings on to my customers.

If you're in business, web standards and browsers that stick to them ultimately mean lower-price, faster, less flabby, better quality websites, made for you in a shorter amount of time and accessible to all. Web standards are a 100% win situation for business... or at least, they would be, if that effort hadn't been completely scuppered by Microsoft.

Internet Explorer's standards support is SO bad that it doesn't even work properly as a line of consecutive products! Each version has it's own bugs, with IE6.0, IE5.5 and IE5.0 having plenty of significant, different page rendering bugs, not to mention IE5.x on the Mac, which is a whole different creature again.

The fact is, at the moment, if you're really serious about web standards, you've got your work cut out to learn all the workarounds for at least four different versions of Internet Explorer - all deviant and broken in their own individual ways. The announcement of yet another one in the pipeline (especially a hurried release of a currently vapourware product like this) summons mostly the feeling of salt being rubbed into wounds. Anything that isn't fixed in this version is only going to hang around to create yet more problems for us in years to come, and going on Microsoft's track record, I'm not holding my breath in the slightest.

Still, assuming the very best possible scenario (proper standards support and people rushing to upgrade), when IE7 comes out, it'll possibly offer a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel. However, there will be a time delay of probably at least another five years before professional web developers can afford not to care so much about IE5, let alone IE6. Overall, we're simply not going to be able to move forwards from this point in web technology for an extremely long time.

Microsoft have caused this problem by not giving a damn about supporting the web standards that they themselves helped to draw up, which is why I find it utterly criminal that it's not them who pay the price of their bodgework on a daily basis.

Quite frankly, Internet Explorer is holding back the web, because those of us who really know our stuff are being prevented from developing professional websites to the best of our abilities - in terms of the things we can realistically do on a web page, and in terms of how long it takes us to bugfix what's left semi-available to us.

Sure, we can do some nice standards-compliant-IE-breaking stuff on our blogs and personal sites, but when clients are paying good money, they expect websites to work in Internet Explorer, and that includes version 5.0.

This requires A LOT of extra work to do well, and the situation isn't going to change for A LONG time yet, which is why good web developers will still continue to be regularly shafted by Microsoft for many years to come.

The state of the web is being held down in a stranglehold, because behind all their marketing hot air, Microsoft really don't care about industry standards, innovation or interoperability. (That's before I even get as far as mentioning Internet Explorer's absolutely appalling security record.)

Still, why should Microsoft care? It's not them who picks up the pieces!

If countless other far smaller organisations can independently implement an industry standard almost perfectly to arrive at the same destination as each other, why can't Microsoft - one of the biggest software companies in the world - manage to get it's act together?

The answer is simple: Microsoft have stopped caring about the web.

After soundly thrashing Netscape in the previous browser war, they've had over four years to improve matters, and have sat by and done absolutely nothing. That is because the only thing that really matters to Microsoft is total market dominance, which thanks to the rather "convenient" tie-in between their browser and their operating systems, they currently have secured. (Indeed, it's quite probably one of the most "secured" features of any Microsoft product available, albeit in the wrong category of security!)

Therefore, they can yammer away with their marketing spiel as much as they want to, but let's not get fooled by them again, because our lives will still continue to be made a misery by their waste-of-space browser and it's older relatives for the foreseeable future, unless we take action NOW.

I say we all need to pack our bags, get the hell out of there and not look back, because it really is time to ditch Internet Explorer for good.

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