Ok, Darwin time. It’s time to admit the truth and face the facts. Internet Explorer needs to die. Die Die Die. And no I don’t just mean version 6. I mean every version. Even the unreleased version 9. Microsoft needs to give it up. If they absolutely must make a browser they should just use the open source webkit rendering engine that Apple and Google use. Its the fastest engine around and it is completely open source.
Hot off of the heals of the German govt. the French govt. has issued a release telling people to not use IE. The French and German governments are rightly concerned that businesses are using technological stone age browsers to view and send sensitive materials.
There are really a few of reasons that Internet Explorer must be laid to rest for the good of the people.
1. IE really sucks when it comes to creating websites. Ask any website designer and they will tell you. When you are creating a website you need to actually design several sites. First you design a site how you would like it to look in Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. And then you develop a website for each version of IE—6, 7, & 8. This is no joke. Designers spend seemingly endless hours tweaking their designs to get them to look good in IE. It is a waste of time and energy and is detrimental to a good work flow.
2. IE really really sucks when it comes to web standards. And standards matter more than any other thing on this great web of ours. Tim Berners Lee often says how if you put a bunch of ants together you won’t get an ant hive if they don’t all operate according to standards. Standards allow amazing things to emerge out of chaotic networks. And internet explorer has horrible standards support. Which means that it is holding back potentially amazing emergence’s. You can really see this with my work in HTML5. Internet Explorer doesn’t really support HTML5. So all of the great new bells and whistles won’t be able to be used by anyone using this dinosaur software. And we can expect many more amazing things to emerge from the web. Each one of these things will be held back in some way by internet explorer.
3 Internet explorer really really really sucks at security. And this might be the most important point of all. Because even though IE sucks at standards support that is really only something that someone who creates websites cares about. After all, the end user doesn’t realize what went into making a site look good across browsers and so therefore has no sense of the difficulty IE brings to developers. But the average user does realize if their system gets hacked. These recent attacks on Google and 20 other major tech companies show that the greatest computers in the cloud are vulnerable to this kind of attack. Do you really think that your personal PC is safe? It isn’t! Stop using Internet Explorer!
I realize that there are still companies that are dependant on IE and that is just ridiculous. I think it speaks volumes about Microsoft that they don’t bend heaven and earth to create some kind of software that allows these legacy systems to somehow upgrade to a standards compliant IE9.
Can you image google for 1 day allowing something to happen like this with Chrome? It would never happen. I’m not saying Chrome will never be hacked, I’m sure it will. What I am saying is that if Google had a major hack on an old version of it’s browser it would use some tech magic to help people move away from that browser. It is in their business interest to do so.
Microsoft just doesn’t seem to get that. And that is kinda worrisome. It is worrisome because Microsoft is one of the biggest software companies in the world. They are so entrenched that I would think they are set in stone for a generation. But that may not be the case. the web is like a rushing river. And even the mighty microsoft can get washed away if it doesn’t go with the flow.
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