Numerous stories are floating around the internet that Microsoft has announced that they will update Internet Explorer (aka IE) to version 7 by the years end. Version 6 first appeared several years ago. This is a major shift from their earlier statements that they wouldn't update IE until they released their next version of Windows, the sequel to Windows XP. This has been the source of immense frustration for web developers because of the numerous rendering bugs and proprietary extensions in IE. This is in addition to the numerous security issues (viruses, spyware, etc.) most consumers have had to deal with. Aggravatingly Microsoft's attitude to developers has been, effectively, "suck it up", our browser dominates, who cares about standards? IE is what it is, warts and all. Their only releases for the past couple of years have been minor updates to close security holes.
Could it be that because Firefox is starting (admittedly just starting) to eat into the market share that IE is starting to feel the pressure to do what the market has been screaming for? I hope they fix the rendering bugs and stick to web standards with no Microsoft specific additions. HTML, CSS, Java, and Javascript are supposed to be about standard behavior so that we can have cross platform web applications. Over the past few years, nothing has been more frustrating than doing a tweak to the webpage and then see it broken the next day when I check out the page at work in Internet Explorer. You then spend half an hour doing research about the bug and trying to work around it with ugly hacks. It's why I haven't spent much time changing the page layout. It's too much of a pain to work around the IE issues. Life's too short to waste time that way!
I'll step down off my soapbox now and get some sleep...
Firefox is the way to go. I tell everyone I know to use it and they have been happy with the results.
Posted by: Chris at February 16, 2005 10:10 PM