Monday, July 17, 2006

WHY I HATE IE

For some years Internet Explorere was my native browser in Windows until another competent browser come along (certainly not Netscape!). I was amongst the first to test Firefox at the time with no intention on switching. I was soon attracted to Firefox's clean interace and its speed however minute in my dial up era. It seems that Internet Explorer just has too many bugs and vulnerabillities that does not actually compromise your machine but reduces performances.


To me, vulnerability is not IE's biggest problem. As anyone who's familiar with CSS will tell you, IE's biggest problem is Microsoft's big corporate incompatability. It goes without saying that if you design a high caliber site, its probably not even going to show up in IE without any down grades or hack. Internet Explorer 6.0 simply does not support more advanced techniques and renders half of the properties incorrectly. One of the biggest problem IE have is no hover support for Take for example some features on my site, Blogcrowds, on the forums main page when your mouse hover over the forum name/description and the newest post, in Firefox, they change color and the text blackens making it more interactive and increases legibility. In this case IE does not support hover outside links. To achieve the same effect, if possible in IE, would prbably involve an unprecedented ammount of padding for the link which is imprecise considering different text length and dimensions of the forum description. Same goes for the links inside the list item on the header menu. In Firefox you would see the tabs lighten. There are other browser discrepancies across the site, but most have been fixed and others relatively minor.


Some designer even use IE's lack of support for certain elements to design to different themes for one site. The result of MOSe (Mozilla, Opera Safari enhancements) is surprsingly dramatic while leaving the IE version lackluster in comparison. Hopefully all the will change with Internet Explorer 7.0, for Microsoft its either conform or die...

posted by Stavanger at 5:58 PM

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