I mean, I do hate IE6. Just like I hate IE7. I even hate IE8 a little bit. And, of course, I hate IE9 (for that lousy font rendering and no proper CSS3 support). But I do miss the IE6-days. I never thought I'd say this, but I do miss the days when IE6 was The Browser For Them All.
I still have to support IE6 and IE7. I'm sorry, I'm not some big corporation to say "OK, we're phasing out support for the older browsers". I have a freaking ton of customers running older browsers, OK? Running all possible kinds of older browsers, actually. Including the stupid IE6. I cannot just phase them out.
But even without the older browsers there are still lots of issues with the newest non-IE browsers as well. I won't bore you with the details, but trust me - both Chrome and Firefox have their nuances. And every tiny piece of JavaScript, every non-trivial HTML-code has to be tested in a zoo of browsers. Not to mention mobile devices.
Cross-browser is fine, competition is good, the more the better... But I'm just getting kinda tired of this:
Now, to make this post not so boring, here's a great "History of Web Browsers" infographic by Shahed Syed that he kindly allowed me to publish here. The history of browsers and their popularity over time:
11 comments:
Great Post - Although I completely disagree on the title, I can see where you're coming from. As well as all the browser's used today, there's also the different operating system quirks.
> when IE6 was The Browser For Them All
All being only Windows and possibly MacOSX users?
Opera popularity story is a tragedy. It didn't grew since 1995! Even the awful Safari had been more popular. Sad, cause they have done a great job over the years.
How can you have a history chart of browsers without Mosaic?
OK Alex, you found the pain, now where's the opportunity? Is it a testing service? A new library? An add-on for development environments like Visual Assist X?
By the way, I had to chuckle at the proliferation of profile options. And of course my reaction was, he should add Twitter!
I read somewhere that Windows 8 (or whatever it winds up being called) with have a new version of IE that...will only work on Windows 8.
Which is either Microsoft being monumentally stupid, or Microsoft effectively starting to phase out IE for no apparent reason.
Usually, I go for stupidity as an explantion, but not I'm not sure. I don't know what they think they're doing.
Thankfully even MS is phasing out IE6.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/04/microsoft-kicks-off-effort-to-rid-the-world-of-internet-explorer/
Supporting IE6 is never ending story. If You want to support IE6 You cause that customers will be always with this browser. Sometimes it's need to cut them off by force :) and world will be better.
I have company and we are implementing web applications without this support. Our customers must pay for this browser if they want trully want It
My proposal to fix the problem of growing number of rendering engines would be...
... separate the UI shell of the browser from the rendering engine and make rendering engines like plug ins.
Then give developers the power to decide for their projects what engine they want to use and ad the tag in the HTML header.
That way we've cut the cost of development (and maintenance) and in the same time improve the user's experience of the page. Of course the plugins would have to download as transparently as possible.
That would be easier then hoping they will obey standards.
Is this really such a crazy idea?
I have found that sites that support IE 6 work better overall in all browsers. I am finding a lot of broken sites that won't work in IE 8 lately with all kids of javascript errors. Developers are just testing in Firefox and maybe Chrome and then putting out a product that works well for maybe 70% of people.
Even this form here, it would not post in IE 8 'goog' is undefined... so I had to switch browsers. I shouldn't need to.
Opera seems like a sad story, they've endured for so long for so little.
I hear it is a really good browser, but personally, it lost for me when I saw the huge (like ridiculously huge) toolbar area at the top. Was it ad-supported or something? I don't remember. There was no freakin' way I was going to give away that much screen real-estate. Besides, in those days IE6 held its infamous monopoly over the web and there was little incentive to move elsewhere. And although it kinda sucked, everything else kinda sucked too; I moved momentarily to Firefox because of the tabs, then IE7 came in with tabs and Firefox wasn't really a model of stability, I went back to IE.
I know that wide hideous toolbar thing in Opera was removed eventually, but I was already scared out of it, and it wasn't long until Chrome came out. That was the end of IE for me.
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