Visiting one of my favorite forums I came across a thread talking about making the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. I had the unpleasant experience of reading the following quote:
“As a web developer who has been developing since 99, I am happy to say everything I develop always looks right in IE the first time. I typically need to go back and add extra code to make it work for Firefox because it doesn't understand certain commands.”
This poster must not be using standards. Most likely he has been creating websites for so long, testing only in IE on windows, that he prefers IE specific code. I don't know when he decided to stop learning new techniques or why, but his employer must be happy that it works in IE and doesn't care about any other browser. This mentality causes comments like this one from that same thread:
“I tried Firefox for about 1 week, until I realized that half the stuff on the internet still doesn't work correctly in Firefox ...”
So now we have senior developers not updating their techniques causing their websites to be IE only and users who won’t switch or upgrade in fear of websites not working. So how does this affect the rest of us, we are stuck writing IE fixes and hacks to make our standard compliant websites look acceptable in an antiquated browser. I for one am sick of it.
Much to my hopes and dreams IE is not going anywhere, not unless we make it. It is time we start forcing fellow developers to quit using IE only code/fixes/hacks and to write standard code. As developers we should not be catering to one browser no matter how large it's market share. It is time we force users to upgrade or switch. To do this I have implemented Dean Edwards' noIE. A more extreme option I've come across is to block IE users or even crash their browser by adding the following line of code to your website:
<!--[if IE 6]><style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input><![endif]-->
Whatever happens people need to be educated about IE’s short comings and realize that it’s not Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. fault. In actuality its IE’s inability to play nice and the programmers who choose to cater to its popularity.