I haven’t used IE as my primary browser for a long time. I switched from IE to Opera several years ago. Until recently, however, I’ve always had Internet Explorer installed. This is because there always seemed to be some website that either insisted on users using IE, or was coded in such a way that it only worked in IE. It seems counter-intuitive to me that the browser that is the least standards complient should be the one that everyone codes there website to work with, even at the expense of all of the other browsers, but that was the reality of the industry for a long time. Only now do I believe that that era is almost over; it is now possible to uninstall IE permanently.

The actually came to this conclusion by accident. A few months ago, my cable provider forced me to reactivate my Internet connection. This was altogether a very clumsy and inconvenient process. It consisted of me entering some personal information along with an account number and then waiting for their system to recognize my modem. Not only did this take an incredibly large amount of time, but I also had to complete the entire process in IE6. When I say IE6 I really mean IE6… their software downgraded IE7 without asking. Around an hour an a half later when the process was complete I found that this extremely (really I can’t stress this enough… Cox Communications I hope you read this) poorly written software had crippled IE. It crashed the moment I opened it.

Not wanting to deal with the additional stress of fixing this problem, having just spent a considerable amount of time dealing with my cable company, I happily went about my business, using Opera as my primary browser as always. A few days ago I clicked the IE icon by mistake and was reminded that it was still crippled. After a few months I had not yet needed to open IE even once. This came as a surprise to me as in the past I had occasionally needed to use IE to do things like accessing my bank account and watching certain videos.

So what is the blame for this development. Part of it, I think, is that developers have been (finally) focusing more on cross-browser support. Another part is the browsers themselves; Opera has a feature to identify itself as other browsers, which i nice for circumventing sites that are hardcoded to only allow FireFox or IE. Regardless of what is responsible, I think this is a step in the right direction.