Tinsology

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.

Prior to my absence (which was related to me being deathly ill for a week and then having midterms + projects for the subsequent weeks) I wrote about Microsoft’s latest EU troubles, this time relating to Internet Explorer.

In short the EU doesn’t like the fact that IE is the defualt browser on every installation of Windows. The complaint was initially submitted by Opera Software.

It seems now that the EU has decided that Microsoft must offer some other browsers along side IE as well as offer users a choice of which is to be the default. The decision isn’t final, as MS still has a chance for an appeal.

Personally I’m interested to see how Microsoft reacts to this. Ultimately the decision of which alternative browsers(s) to include may fall to the vendors, which may or may not be a good thing. All of the viable alternatives to IE are open source browsers so this decision as very strong implications or the open source community and the companies backing this software, at least for now. My only fear is that, in the case that the decision of which to incorporate falls to the vendors, is that in a few years time there will be a dozen new proprietary browsers generated by the vendors. There’s something unsettling to me about a Dell browsers pre-installed on thousands of computers.

Of course I’m in the US so I won’t be able to witness the effects of this first-hand.

Word is getting around the the EU anti-trust agency is once again taking a stance against Microsoft. This time the target is Internet Explorer. The EU claims that IE is protected from competition by being bundled with Windows.

BBC Coverage

My thoughts:

IE is by far the dominate browser when it comes to number of users. It is the definition ubiquitous. At this same time it is easily the most critisized browser, even with respect to its market share. It seems to me that these two things should not go together. Microsoft has maintained this lead not through the quality of its software but by the precident of its use.

Personally my browser of choice is Opera, the developers of which were the ones to file the initial complaint that triggered the EU’s response. I do, however, still have IE and occasionally use it when it is necessary. This is probably the case with the majority of us who prefer an alternative to IE. So many sites and apps are coded with IE in mind, that giving up on IE entirely is all but impossible. Instead of being coded to the standards these sites are designed to work with IE, even if that means the function poorly or not at all in other browsers. Does this mean that it is impossible to code an application that works in all of the major browsers? Not at all. You can’t blame Microsoft for lazy developers, but you can blame them for not complying with standards. You may be wondering “If Microsoft is to blame for their lack of standards compliance, and that lack of compliance makes it harder to code apps that work in all browsers, isn’t Microsoft to blame for the lack of apps that work in all browsers?”. In my opinion the answer is no. If developers don’t like having to tweak their code to work with IE then don’t. Just make sure it works in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, or whatever browser you crazy Linux people are using today, and then stick a link on your footer that says “Best viewed in ANYTHING BUT Internet Explorer” and goes to a list of alternative browsers. If this became common practice IE would be up to standards by now.

That beings said, what about the EU and their stance against Microsoft? Should Microsoft have to remove IE from their operating system? In my opinion the answer is it doesn’t matter. The first thing I do when I install a fresh copy of Windows is go to Opera.com, download the browser, and stop using IE from that point on. Clearly, however, this is not the case with the majority of users today. Why? Some of us might think its because people are sheep who don’t know any better and in that case need the EU’s protection. Others would say that it is because IE isn’t that bad and switching to an unfamiliar browser isn’t worth it. I think the answer is that it works. IE works. It works not because Microsoft makes it works. It works because we make it work. We being developers who are willing to bend over backward just so their site looks pristine in IE. For this reason, even if the EU forces Microsoft to offer a version of Windows not bundled with IE, the majority of users will opt to have the version with IE. Even those that don’t will at some point download it because they ran into a site that is coded to not allow users with alternative browsers to view their content.

My point is: Don’t count on the EU to fix all of the problems you have with IE. If you are a developer who is afraid to publish a site that is compliant  to the standards, looks good in all of the alternative browsers, but for whatever reason isn’t quite right in IE then you are to blame. Stop worrying about your adsense revenue (you don’t make that much anyways ) and realize that if you act like sheep then Microsoft has no problem herding you. Worse yet, if you are a developer who prevents users who are not using IE from view their site, or happily notifies its users that “this site is bested viewed in Internet Explorer” then you should know that you embody all that is wrong with the world today.