Well, well, well. Hell hath finally frozen over. For years and years we have been suffering with Internet Explorer 6 here at work and today we upgrade to IE8. Not much better, but just enough to keep the mutiny down for a couple more years.
There are not many web browsers that have been credited with actually holding back the progress of the internet, but IE6 is a pristine example. It's built on old tech and millions of people are still using it. Things are so bad that every website must be written twice: once for IE6 and once for everybody else.
It is not at all uncommon to browse to a site with IE6 and be greeted by some version of:
"We've noticed you are using a dangerous, insecure and non-standard-based browser. Supporting your browser would stifle internet creativity. Please upgrade before continuing to our site. We recommend Firefox, Safari, or Chrome."
I kid you not, and they get much worse from there. Posted below is just the merest smattering of examples, there are many, may more online.
I'd venture that most people have absolutely no idea of the hatred that web developers have for Internet Explorer.
The difference between IE and Safari, which is what I use at home, is astonishing. Safari (like Firefox and Chrome) is thoroughly modern and supports the newest features of the web like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and HTML5 with inline video. It's got the blazing fast Nitro JavaScript engine and loads websites crisply and quickly and they look gorgeous. And then I go to work and the same site hangs up, takes forever, errors out, and the parts that do load look terrible.
So why did it take us so long to get rid of that boat anchor? Seems my company has built lots of specialty apps that only run on IE6 and just now they've converted them to open standards.
If you are still using IE on Windows, please try Firefox. You'll never go back.
