Recently, the Mix10 Developers Conference was held in Las Vegas. Numerous speakers presented, including Dean Hachamovitch, the General Manager of Microsoft’s IE Group. He said numerous things, which were recapped in Larry Barrett’s article on HTML Goodies. Take a read at Larry’s article, it’s interesting, and thought provoking.
Internet Explorer 9 has a preview out there, you can find it here: Internet Explorer 9
I want to thank Larry for writing this article…but honestly…Does anyone want to see another version of IE? As a web developer, and the owner of a website development company in the Boston Mass area, I am constantly frustrated by the challenges that all versions of IE present. If you take a look at the Browser Stats that I have posted on our blog monthly, you will find that IE, overall, is losing ground. Many people are upgrading their browsers to the latest and greatest, however, IE continues to lose market share month after month. Some months, they lose more, some months, less, but ultimately the trend is down.
Website companies would be able to charge less per new website, if the browser companies would all get on the same page when it comes to handling the code that we develop. The browsers are issues for free. They issue them to get market share (or at least that is my opinion of what Microsoft does with IE). Google and Chrome are likely doing the same thing. However the overwhelming share of browser usage goes to Firefox, which doesn’t have any direct correlation to making money. It’s time Microsoft ended this browser war and stopped issuing versions of their browser and reached out to Firefox to form a partnership. There is no need to keep developing platforms that website developers have to keep testing for the sites we develop. Even when our sites validate to standards, they still sometimes don’t render correctly in Internet Explorer.
Microsoft has issued so many versions of their browser, that we are forced to test in all the versions, because clients are concerned about how their websites are viewed in each….which is a fair objection. But who is paying for that time to test in all the browsers? The client, not Microsoft. It’s time to ditch IE and move to Firefox or Chrome as the go to browser!
See you later Microsoft!!!
Tags: browsers, IE, website browsers