Jul 21, 2007
Please forgive my being blunt here, but I fucking hate Internet Explorer.It's one of the key things holding back the internet, and it has personally cost me and my employers thousands of dollars in lost time and wasted development.
The worlds largest software developer basically doesn't care and it becomes my problem to code around the things they are too lazy to fix in their browser.
Better alternatives
That said, it's my personal agenda to convert the world to better, alternative browsers.About 6 months ago, I was checking out my site stats and noticed that my Firefox traffic exceeded my Internet Explorer traffic. Currently the majority (47%) of the visitors at www.ragepank.com use Firefox, and a good proportion Safari too, and that's fantastic to see. Typically on the sites I create, I see about 85% Internet Explorer, 10 - 12% Firefox, and the rats and mice shared between Safari, Opera and the rest.
Silverstripe pwns IE
Jojo CMS is one of the projects I'm working on right now. It's a cool CMS product currently as an Alpha release, and we are really pleased with how development is coming along.I'm also keeping an eye on Silverstripe, currently the leading open source CMS in New Zealand. As it turns out, from an end-user point of view Jojo isn't entirely different to Silverstripe, even though it was developed completely independantly. It's cool to see how Kiwis think alike. I like their system, and totally rate it on a world scale.
Anyway. I'm reading Silverstripe's blog today and see they get 64% Firefox and 24% IE traffic. Wow.
Nice work guys. Hats off.
Then I check the stats for www.jojocms.org and I see that we are getting 62% Firefox and 27% Internet Explorer, and that puts a smile on my face. Not quite up to Silverstripe's standard, but respectably close.
The world is changing. At least in some areas, but it's good to see IE losing market share to companies which have a clearly better product.
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Comments
Rex - Aug 11, 2007
Fight the good fight! My stats show IE 42% and Firefox $36, so I guess I need to target a more educated crowd.
Rex - Aug 11, 2007
Whoops. I meant 36% in Firefox not $36. My bad!
Abderisak Adam - Aug 22, 2007
You sure hit this nail on the head. I am not a ashamed of being a supporter of Microsoft products but IE has been a terrible failure.
I think part of the reason is due to Microsoft having almost 100% of the market for several years (in the case of internet browsers). I think you remember the famous case; The United States vs Microsoft (1998) The case was directly related to IE and the bundling that Microsoft where doing.
And anyone who has studied economy knows that the lack of competition leads to worse products (usually), IE is one of the best examples to illustrate this.
Sry for long comment, just my 0.02$
Michael - Sep 3, 2007
I would be happier with Firefox had it displayed all the websites the same as IE. The problem I have always have is that sites are optimized for IE. If you use Myspace and I think there are about a Billion people that do, You should be using IE, Otherwise pages display differently. Also, Even with W3C compliant pages on my Article Directory, the HTML Editor Functions like Bold and Switch Between HTML and Standard with Posting and Article dont work with Firefox, Why NOT? Sorry Guys, But Firefox is lacking, and until its fixed I'm not going to be using it.
Harvey - Sep 3, 2007
It's hardly Firefox's fault that MySpace pages don't render correctly.
MySpace designs are hardly an example of how to design a webpage - rather most designs are examples of what you shouldn't do with your website, my favourites being body text on top of textured backgrounds, animated bling all over the place, marquee tags for scrolling text, and smily faces plastered all over the place. It's very rare that standards compliant code works properly in IE but doesn't work in Firefox.
If MySpace doesn't work properly in Firefox, it's most likely that the designers didn't bother testing in a standards compliant browser, or don't know what a standards compliant browser actually is.
The reason the HTML editor commands don't work in Firefox is that IE and Firefox interpret Javascript differently, and apparently your editor wasn't tested thoroughly in Firefox. There are plenty of editors out there that do function properly in both browsers.
IE has achieved mainstream popularity because it comes preinstalled on the most popular operating system in the world. If it came down to features, IE loses on almost all fronts.
It still cracks me up watching IE7 users get excited about tabbed browsing as if it's some great new MS invention, when Opera has had this for, I dunno, 5 or so years.
I think the whole problem really stems from some of the older browsers (talking IE/Netscape 3 vintage here) really bent over backwards to make poorly written HTML code render nicely. This meant there was basically no incentive to write nice code - developers would do the bare minimum required to get the page looking ok. Now, we are having problems with browsers that ignore standards in favor of maintaining compatibility with old code. While it seems odd, a fussy browser that won't accept bad code is actually a good thing for the web as a whole, as developers will need to follow the standards more closely if they want their pages to look good.
Michael - Sep 16, 2007
I don't disagree with your statement, but what about the people that are just starting out writing HTML. Should we not cater to them? I'm not a Newby and I understand the code and how to write it properly, but when my nieces or nephews grow up, I want a pretty large learning curve.
The fact of myspace being written for IE users doesn't change the fact that FireFox could have written a few extra lines in the C# program to accomidate for Sloppy Code. Since I cannot change what myspace displays or what Firefox displays I just voiced my opinion about why I don't use Firefox, but don't get me wrong, there are some wonderful features that firefox has that I'm sure Windows will one day steal.
Harvey - Oct 3, 2007
It's an interesting argument that one about browsers catering for sloppy code. I was giving someone grief the other day about some appalingly bad malformed HTML code, but at the end of the day it worked fine in all browsers I could think of.
I'm actually starting to notice a lot more sites that aren't working properly in Firefox these days, and really I think it comes down to the fact that developers are either from the Microsoft camp or the OS camp.
Would be nice if the standards were just that.
Joshua Issac - Jun 16, 2008
It's Firefox fanboys who show disrespect to Internet Explorer who put me off Mozilla Firefox.
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sue - Jul 30, 2007
When you try to connect to Web folders, you may receive the following error message: "The current operation could not be completed because an <a href="www.internet-explorer-errors.com/index.php?k=internet+explorer+6,7">unexpected error</a>has occurred."