This isn’t an April Fools post. IE really does suck, and continue to suck. Sure, they’ve improved some things and broken some new things. IE continues to lag behind every other browser.
A co-worker sent the site below a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to post it on here. The site gives a ton of examples of how IE does things wrong and differently than the rest of the pack.
Time and time again, nothing beats testing in true environments: in the case of a Windows browser, that means us Mac users must possess multiple OS’s running multiple versions of the web browsers from Parallels, VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox. Faking it any other way is only asking for trouble. I’ve experienced it time and time again.
Here’s another article that supports that, this time using IE9′s browser modes.
The Dangers of Cross-Browser Testing with IE9′s Browser Modes
Saw this on Quora and meant to share it yesterday. There’s a lot of good info in here, and Hadi Partovi insight was especially interesting and valuable:
We do tend to give Internet Explorer a bad rap. OK, it totally deserves it. But it’s interesting to read a little bit of the history of the earlier versions of IE. I don’t really recall IE from that time period. I was completely focused on Netscape and Mosaic before that.
I really had no idea that so much of today’s web development landscape had its foundations in Micrsoft’s web browser.
So even jQuery is saying goodbye to hacks for old versions of Internet Explorer when jQuery 2.0 is released next year. Good riddance!
But for all of our legacy projects (and clients), this means we’ll being loading up separate old versions of the jQuery core for older versions of IE (jQuery 1.9 when 2.0 is released for every other modern browser).
I originally read about it here:
Loading a Different jQuery Version for IE6-8
See the jQuery core team’s follow-up here:
jQuery 1.9 and 2.0 TLDR Edition
Co-worker shared this with the company yesterday, and I just ran out of time to post it. I love the idea of making others aware of their out-of-date software — it’s one thing if there were a cost involved, but most people just aren’t updating their computers. It leaves them vulnerable to security exploits and is dumbing down their web experience:
Nice writeup from over at Lifehacker about spending a week with the modern version of Internet Explorer (IE9). There’s no doubt the browser has improved, but I think the main complaint most have is supporting (and having to test) legacy versions of the browser that were just plain horrible.
To me, anyone doing a comparison of multiple modern browsers, IE is never going to be the number one choice.
A Week With Internet Explorer: Not the Browser You’ve Always Despised
A co-worker sent this site to me last week. It’s basically a way to get some CSS3 properties working in older versions of Internet Explorer (6-9) via an .htc file.
I can’t tell you how excited I am for this. IE6 numbers should start to really drop now, and we can say goodbye to a lot of conditional stylesheets, PNG fixes, etc.
Next month, Microsoft will start force upgrading old browsers. And why the hell shouldn’t they?
Other than some businesses that are on antiquated web applications, everyone will benefit from this. This is a happy happy time for the web and everyone who uses it and makes anything for it.
Beginning in January it will roll out automatic upgrades of IE to the newest version suitable for a user’s version of Windows. Windows XP users still on IE6 or IE7, for example, will be updated to IE8; Windows Vista or Windows 7 users running IE7 or IE8 will be pushed to IE9.
Microsoft Gets Silent Upgrade Religion, Will Push IE Auto-Updates
We spend a lot of time placating Internet Explorer. But with time, we even can wrangle in IE to play [fairly] nice. A lot of the issues with IE, you’ll start to recognize over and over (Double margins anyone?).
This is a great rundown of the common IE bugs and various ways to squash them. I prefer using conditional commented style sheets whenever possible so as not to bloat my main style sheet with hacks and IE fixes.
