Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), which ruled the Internet for almost two decades, has finally been overtaken (browser shares wise) by Google’s Chrome browser. Of course, techno heads have known for years that IE just wasn’t cutting it, but it seems that Microsoft has finally reached the same conclusion and have begun the process of shutting down IE. Forever.
While doing research for this blog, I searched “Internet Explorer shuts down” on Google. These were the results:
- Internet Explorer opens, flashes, and then closes immediately
- What to do when Internet Explorer isn't working
- My Internet Explorer keeps shutting down
- How to fix Internet Explorer when it keeps closing
- Why does my Internet Explorer keep shutting down
- Internet Explorer keeps shutting down
- Internet Explorer immediately shuts down upon start
Results went on in this vein for two pages before I came to one result that closely resembled the information I was looking for, followed by even more results about IE problems.
Not too long after computer people started hating IE, the rest of us saw the light, and IE became the victim of brutal Internet-playground bullying (see some of the jokes here).
Microsoft and IE stuck to their guns, creating iteration after iteration of the browser, each with its own delightful bugs for developers to try to work around, not to mention several security issues.
I asked Flow developer Caven Erasmus what it was like trying to make websites work in IE and his response was, “Horrible ... It's long and tedious to set up a site for IE, because you have to backtrack most, if not all, of your styles so that the site is backwards compatible with the old browser, meaning most, if not all, functionality needs to be ripped out or hacked to try get it to work.”
Developer Alex Cowling has a more positive view, saying, “If you use the right techniques, you don’t really have to do anything fancy to get a site to work perfectly in IE.”
She also points out that because the way that HTML is rendered in IE is used to an extent in the rest of Microsoft’s programs, it is unlikely that IE will ever go away completely, unless the company begins building new programs from the ground up.
However, she does go on to say that web development is held back by it, in the sense that web developers have to be less ambitious when creating sites to be viewed on IE. “If IE were to get with the programme and take the same approaches as Firefox and Chrome, we would be seeing really exciting stuff – ways to present data to people on the web in exciting new ways, such as animated infographics – because we would know that everyone can see them.”
She also points out that in South Africa there’s still a vast number of Internet users that view the web with IE.
However, many developers (especially internationally) have given up on even trying to make things work in older versions of IE, and some aren’t bothering to try to make sites work in IE at all. After all, if people are still viewing the web through IE, they are probably used to seeing broken sites.
Although many herald this as a miracle for web development, and the saviour of all the computers and laptops that would have faced death by cricket bat or trips out of the window, there are some that see the death of IE as something that should be mourned just a little. As one Facebook commenter eloquently put it: “I used Internet Explorer all through my childhood, and because of that I have a strange sentimental attachment to it. Even though I use chrome all the time, I think I'd still be sad to see it go :( Like turning off the life support of that childhood friend who's in a coma and you haven't visited for a while :( ”
Microsoft groupies needn’t despair though. Microsoft has announced that in the future IE will be replaced by its new web browser, currently codenamed Project Spartan. Let's just hope the computer software giant has learnt from its past mistakes.