Why I hate IE6. And why I miss IE6
by Alex Yumashev ·
Apr 17 2011
I'm getting kinda tired of cross-browser development. Yes, I know... The more the better, competition rocks, rendering standards are great, FireFox is cool, Chrome is awesome, and the evil MSIE monopoly is sacrilege.
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:
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:
