The Nightmare That Is Internet Explorer
Most Web Designers will tell you Internet Explorer is holding the web back. I’ve always taken a rather pragmatic view about the whole affair. It’s not up to us to tell people how to surf the web. It’s up to us to design for those people. I’m starting to re-evaluate that opinion though.
Layout differences are easy enough to deal with. We just display alternative style sheets for different browsers. It does however increase the time we are required to spend ensuring our sites look just right on your browser of choice. That’s our problem, not yours (though if you are a client you really should be concerned with how our time is being held up by just one browser). Recently though, with the move towards new web technologies, Internet Explorer is starting to hold back how we can make sites work better and that’s getting frustrating.
A good example is on this site. As it’s a personal site I’m keen to exploit new technolgies and use it as a testing ground for things I develop for clients. The image gallery at the bottom of the page is written in jQuery, works perfectly in all browsers… breaks in IE with a completely non-specific error. I’ve spent an hour or so looking into it with no joy (edit – after another hour I’ve found that Internet Explorer does not support window.innerWidth). Frustrating to say the least. I just can’t see why it is that I can code a site knowing it will work fine in all Browsers with the exception of Internet Explorer and then must spend extra time getting the same functionality to work on it alone (not to mention how each version of Internet Explorer has it’s own issues).
The main reason someone should upgrade to a better browser is that on nearly all accounts Internet Explorer is the weakest application on the market. It’s simply an inferior piece of kit. Have a look at this infographic.
Internet Explorer uses more resources, renders styles and selects items on a page slower than any other modern browser out there. It’s like driving up a motorway in a scooter. Why would you do that to yourself?
Use of Internet Explorer also holds innovation back. The following issues are unlikely to be resolved in the next decade if people continue to use Internet Explorer:
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Limited Data URI Support
Support for this could speed up the delivery of web content. All it means is instead of referencing data it can be embedded within the page.
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SVG Graphics
Again, support for this could really speed up your browsing experience. This graphics format can be edited using a text editor, can scale to any size and allows user interaction (think Flash without the plugins).
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CSS3 Colours
Instead of us designers using Javascript or graphics files to create transparency on the web we could just use css. Not at present unfortunately.
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Embedded Fonts
All other browsers use OpenType Font embedding, Internet Explorer does not use this, using it’s own EOT font format. In fairness it was first to the game regarding font embedding, but OpenType is by far the most popular font format these days.
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Text Shadows
Putting nice drop shadows on text is just simply not supported. Could be a blessing though as I could see it being well over used
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Rounded Corners
Instead of creating graphics to give the effect of nice rounded corners on boxes we could just be using a simple css declaration.
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Multiple Columns
This is a must have feature. At present text cannot flow dynamically into neat columns. That’s why you either see carefully designed sites where the text is placed in each column statically (or the columns are uneven) or you have lines of text that are just too hard to read. Alternatively you do what I’ve done on this site and increase the size of the text / decrease the area it is displayed on. The optimum amount of text on a line for readability is 10 or so words. Go grab a book off the shelf and see for yourself. Multiple columns are a great idea. They’ve been employed in print for centuries. If Internet Exlorer has it’s way it could be decades before we get to use it on the web.
There’s a lot more Internet Explorer cannot do but the above are my main gripes. If this sort of thing interests you check out When can I use.
So if you are reading this on Internet Explorer please consider upgrading to another browser.
