Microsoft kicks off effort to rid the world of Internet Explorer 6

[rocketpig]

HappySqurriel said:

rocketpig said:

HappySqurriel said:

This is actually one of the reasons I feel "sorry" (for lack of a better term) for Microsoft and think that their negative reputation is not entirely earned. You’d (probably) be surprised by how often you will come across someone who bashes Microsoft for being so insecure and when you look at their system you will see that they’re still running IE 6, haven’t done a security update on their computer since they bought it 5 years ago, their anti-virus software reached end of life years ago and they haven’t received a virus definition update since then, and their system is loaded with crap because every time they come across a accept/reject screen they accept everything without ever reading what it says.

Microsoft brought this on themselves. They intentionally created IE6 to "break" the internet. They ignored standards in a purposeful move to make developers either code a site for IE or code one for Netscape. That's why the thing is so bloody mind-wracking for web designers. It goes off in its own direction and is intentionally non-compliant for many basic, standardized features in CSS and PHP. The end result is that because of their intentional hamstringing of the Internet and their short-sighted methodology (add in an automatic update system and this problem goes away in 2005) caused this to be a far larger mess than it ever needed to be.

As a full-time web designer and developer, it will take me a LONG TIME before I forgive MS for adding years of frustration and hassle to my job for no reason other than greed and incompetence.

At about the time Microsoft was releasing IE 7 I was working on a project where the required browsers we supported was IE 5.5, IE 6, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, and two versions of safari (I can't remember the versions). From what I remember, the results you received between all 6 browsers was very different. The reason for the vast array of different results between browsers was that the HTML spec was actually very poorly written because a large portion of it was left open to interpretation. To make matters worse, each browser had features that were not part of the HTML or Javascript specs, and they were widely used because they offered functionality that was desirable.

While IE was often the biggest headache, the real blame for this mess falls with the W3C for not creating a well-defined comprehensive spec for HTML and javascript.

Yes, the W3C is partially at fault but all other browsers mostly supported its standards. IE6 blatantly disregarded its standards in an attempt to break Netscape, which was the dominant browser of the time. Mozilla wasn't even on the scene at this point, nor was WebKit, which is the foundation for Chrome and Safari. They existed but had such a small market share as to be irrelevant.

I'm not saying that IE6 had its quirks, what I'm saying is that some of the *core* standards of CSS and other languages were flatly ignored by Microsoft. The only reason to do something this drastic was to crush Netscape and Communicator. There's a difference between having to use a few tags here and there to make something work versus having to recode huge portions of your site because MS didn't want to play nicely with everyone else. They had the power through their Windows distribution and they were determined to crush everyone in their path. It worked for awhile, too. They had nearly 90% of the browser market during IE6's hayday but through their own incompetence and laziness, allowed their update cycle to slow to a point where FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc. were allowed a foothold that has continually eroded their marketshare since that point.

People tend to forget that IE6 released in 2001. It predates almost every other browser used today by a longshot.