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Why do I hate Internet Explorer so?

Rants and raves, mostly.

Why do I hate Internet Explorer so?

Postby Aaron » Thu Jan 12, 2006 10:30 am

Hi All,

If you're an Internet Explorer user and you've visited the front page any time recently, you may be wondering what I've got against MSIE. Well, I just noticed that the layout in IE was completely wonky (maybe for as long as a month), with the news hidden off the bottom of the screen. Now it's partly my fault, since I should have checked the page in IE in addition to Firefox and Opera (I guess I forgot). Nevertheless, the number of times I've had to hack this site to make it look right for IE is beyond recount. I'm still going to be upset with Microsoft for a little while yet, but when my rage subsides I'll dispense with the nag-banner.

In other news, my site stats show that 52% of visitors use Firefox, and another 8% use Opera. Mozilla, Konqueror and Safari are on 1.5%, 0.9% and 0.6% respectively (I love you guys). A big hello to the Netscape user too.

Cheers,
Aaron.
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Postby Q-dad » Thu Jan 12, 2006 12:58 pm

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Postby Hinklemister » Thu Jan 12, 2006 3:20 pm

I hate IE too. Except for when I'm at school I always use Firefox. I was actually very very happy today when I saw that error at school :) .
I'm 17 years old and make games!
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Postby JavaJones » Fri Jan 13, 2006 1:27 am

I hate IE in principle, but I must admit I still use it as more or less my primary browser because of Avant. IE shells like Avant giving IE tab support, pop-up blocking (before IE 6 had it), etc. have meant that I haven't *had* to move away from IE. And while I know it does things wrong, it still displays the majority of pages better than any other browser, unfortunately. When I'm not succumbing to the devil's music (IE :D) I love Opera though. Talk about an exercise in good design!

- Oshyan
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Postby Aaron » Fri Jan 13, 2006 2:39 am

I'll have to respectfully differ with you there Oshyan. These days I find that IE gives me more grief with all the new standards-compliant websites than FF or Opera give me with old hacked-for-IE sites. Of course, I still keep IE around somewhere should I need to view some old-and-broken website, but I haven't had to do that in ages.

I actually held on to IE for quite a while, and before I moved to Firefox I jumped half-way and used CrazyBrowser, which is (or was?) a shell for IE that includes tabs, like Avant. The reason I kept moving wasn't tabs or even security, it was the IE rendering engine. IE6 is just too old to support some stuff properly.

For example, the problem I had with the news page was that IE was shuffling <DIV>s downwards because it doesn't know how to wrap position:relative DIV elements (z-order, and such). Now the argument can be made that I shouldn't be using elements that can't be rendered properly in IE, and indeed I don't any more, but it really gives me the shits that I had to make an ugly hack to otherwise nice code, which would've looked better, and which worked OK for the other 63% of site visitors. Standards are a nice idea, and I hope and pray that IE7 does a better job of them. If it does, I would have no problem with switching back.

Toodles,
Aaron.
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Postby Aaron » Fri Jan 13, 2006 6:09 am

Hah! For all my banging-on about standards, I just realised that the front-page didn't validate as HTML4.01 as it claimed. The problem was only to do with the google search box, though, since it's XHTML (same goes for this forum; it's HTML with XHTML and doesn't validate). Rather than take the conscientious approach of upgrading the whole site to XHTML, I took the easy way out and stripped the search-box from the page when the W3C validator checks it. I'll do the XHTML later, m'thinks.
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Postby Rofar » Fri Jan 13, 2006 10:58 pm

I don't hate IE and really resisted going away from it for a long long time. Finally though, I downloaded Mozilla and have only opened IE up since when it was absolutely necessary. So I can't say I hate IE because that is a bit harsh but I can admit I like Mozilla quite a bit more.
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Postby Aaron » Sat Jan 14, 2006 12:09 am

You're right of course Rofar. There's not much point hating a program, particularly when there are plenty of other alternatives. The reason IE has me pissed-off at the moment, though, is because it breaks the internet for web-developers, who have no alternative but to develop sites that look right on all the browsers used by their visitors. A large proportion of those visitors are using a program that doesn’t work like the rest, and it just makes things more difficult than they should be. But there are worse evils in the world, no doubt.
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Postby JavaJones » Tue Jan 17, 2006 4:46 am

My experience simply differs from yours then. Maybe you browse more geek-core sites where people don't spend the time to make their page render right on IE (which often breaks it in other browsers!). But I maintain that "the majority" of sites I visit render better in IE, for better or worse. But I stress again that I largely agree with you on the principle of the thing - I really, really wish IE were more standards compliant and I hope IE7 will be (and that it will be available for XP, so it gets a decent-sized installbase).

To illustrate my personal perspective on this, I had a meeting with a web dev recently as part of getting settled in a new job. One of my questions to him was about which browser he uses. He answered IE and I immediately thought less of him, lol. Then he explained why and it got worse. :-p Basically he said that because so many people already use IE he "has to", in order to view pages the way his clients probably are, so he just sticks with IE. IMO that's pretty poor reasoning. You can of course test a site on any browser you choose, but what you choose to use *yourself* is a reflection of your attitude toward standards, etc. As a web developer I was particularly dismayed to see his disregard for standards.

- Oshyan
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Postby Aaron » Tue Jan 17, 2006 6:49 am

Hi Oshyan,

I suspect you're right on that one. The sites I tend to visit with any regularity (news, digg, etc) are popular and/or geeky, which in either case means the webmaster(s) have probably spent the time to make sure the site renders the same in every browser. I suppose I’m also less likely to return to a site that looks a bit shoddy in FF/Opera, and maybe that’s due to the effect of first-impressions, or maybe I sub-consciously discount any site that hasn’t bothered to fix their code (or even consciously, since I can be a little elitist at times).

Anyway, I’ve calmed down from my anti-IE rage from a few days ago and have pulled the “your browser is broken” warning from all pages except the home page. Users are once again welcome to browse the rest of the site with IE free from harassment, and I will in future try harder to write better code that works in all browsers.

Cheerio,
Aaron.

Edit: In other news, I've upgraded most of the site to the XHTML 1.0 Strict standard, with a few pages as XHTML 1.0 Transitional (only to use <div align="center">, which is illegal in strict). The tutorials are still in HTML 4.01 Transitional, but these will upgraded shortly. The upshot is that the website should now render much more consistently in all post-2000 browsers.
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