Recently, Charl van Niekerk posted his comments about dumping IE, and I totally agree with everything he said. This site does not, and will not support IE until such time as IE supports the standards – like that will ever happen!. If you haven’t already, fire up IE and take a look at this site. You should notice that it degrades somewhat gracefully. The content is fully accessible, though it’s not quite as visually appealing as it is in Firefox and Opera.
Here are my reasons, especially for web developers like myself, to stop supporting IE and allow websites to noticably degrade in IE and other older browsers. Most have already totally given up on Netscape 4.x, so it’s about time we did the same for IE.
The target audience for developer sites like this is, of course, web developers. If web developers start to find that the resources they need to learn and improve their skills do not work in IE, they will be forced to use alternative browsers. Of course, many developers like us already know about the plethora of bugs and serious lack of standards complaince in IE, but as can be seen by the stats at W3Schools, around 70% of web developers (well, of those that are just learning) still use IE. It is these developers that we need to convert to better alternative browsers, and the sooner the better.
By converting the developers, they will learn more about standards compliant, and interoperable code. They will notice the severe flaws in IE’s implementation. They will be forced to make sites that work properly in non-IE browsers, since they’ll be using one themselves. As more sites adopt standards, and stop locking out non-IE browsers, we will have a better chance of taking back the web!
The Firefox community may be aiming for a 10% market share within 12 months among the general population, but among web developers we need to work harder. I want to aim to completely reverse those stats on W3Schools. Let’s aim for 70% market share for non-IE browsers, including Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, Omni-Web and Mosaic (just kidding), etc… So join us! Remove the countless IE hacks from your stylesheet, except the ones that are absolutely necessary to maintain accessibility. Indeed, there is even a single hack in my stylesheet that simply prevents the menu overlapping the main content. Let’s send a message to those that build the sites! Let’s give them a reason to switch!
Bravo!
I originally thought that I was going crazy when I made that post, because I thought almost every single web developer out there was still supporting standards. I’m very glad to see that that isn’t the case though.
So, let’s lead the road to IE-incompliance! 🙂
Whoops, I made an error in my previous comment. When I was saying “I thought almost every single web developer out there was still supporting standards” I actually meant “I thought almost every single web developer out there was still supporting Internet Explorer”.
Sorry about that; I guess I must learn to proofread! 🙂
LOL! I had a good laugh, but I understood what you meant.
It’s a shame though… IE once was a great browser and actually the best at the time (now almost 4 years ago). It’s a pitty Micro$oft has put the larger part of the web-community into ‘ignore mode’ and almost totally abandoned development of IE.
Some claim the browser wars are back, but there’s hardly a war here. IE’s market-share is dropping by the day and open source standard-compliant browsers, like Firefox, are gaining.
I’m totally into the concept of open source and think it’s the best sollution for software like this – or any software, for that matter.
I’m patiently trying to ‘convert’ the clients and colleagues I work with to Firefox, in the hope the commercial and government world will also switch to standard compliancy. Most people just don’t seem to know there’s something better out there. Something safe and great to use (or… am I the only one noticing a major speed slow down in Firefox 1.0 when working with extensive css tricks – using a crancy 1Ghz AMD?).
Anyhow, I second your lobby: don’t support IE!