Dethroning Internet Explorer

May 25, 2004

I’ve been flip­ping through More Eric Meyer on CSS (excel­lent book by the way) and real­ized that despite what I’ve learned in the past year about CSS, there are sev­eral things I still need to refine and improve upon.

My achilles ten­don is the 3-column fluid lay­out, which I’ve exper­i­mented upon, but as of late the lay­out tends to break in Inter­net Explorer 6 (and below). I’ve been read­ing var­i­ous sources about clear­ing floats, namely Clear­ing floats with­out struc­tural markup and Floatu­to­r­ial. It makes sense that floats were essen­tially designed for float­ing images (sim­i­lar to apply­ing an image wrap in a word pro­cess­ing pro­gram), how­ever, it still puts a tack in my side when I’m cod­ing a site for a client and keep run­ning into the same brick wall, or the obstruc­tion bet­ter known as Inter­net Explorer.

I scratch my head over the fact that 87% of Inter­net users still use IE as their main browser of choice, when there are other alter­na­tives that just do the job bet­ter. When I praised the ben­e­fits of using Fire­fox (or a more con­for­mant browser) at work, my co-workers shrugged it off. Their rea­son being that they were com­fort­able with Inter­net Explorer and didn’t want to change what browser they used. Like­wise, it seems most peo­ple (out­side of the Web Stan­dards gen­er­a­tion) could care less if their browser is con­for­mant nor do they lose sleep over dis­play bugs, they are just com­fort­able and would rather not change their browser.

That shouldn’t stop those who are will­ing to pro­mote stan­dard com­pli­ant browsers, but it does mean the use of hacks to make sure the site is cross-browser com­pat­i­ble, which is a headache in itself.

I sim­ply can­not wait for the day when more con­for­mant browsers are adopted by the bulk of the pop­u­la­tion and IE is dethroned. Unless Microsoft has plans for releas­ing a more com­pli­ant ver­sion of Inter­net Explorer or patch up 6.0, they will even­tu­ally lose the mar­ket on browser dom­i­nance and the sun will shine again for those still in the shadow. 

8 comments

You might want to improve your prais­ing tech­niques. Show off some cool Fire­fox fea­tures. Laugh in their face every time they get a pop-up or their IE crashes (you might want to avoid doing that to the boss). Use a lit­tle tab­bing & open­ing in back­ground trick­ery. Mouse ges­tures can be very inter­est­ing too.

Aver­age users don’t care about stan­dards. They even tend to ignore all the secu­rity issues, even after they’ve been hit by one of them. But be cool, and they’ll come.

by Jarek Piórkowski on May 25, 2004 at 11:35 pm. Reply #

Oh, I’ve touted over the fea­tures of Fire­fox. My favorites being tabbed brows­ing (as men­tioned), auto­matic popup blocker, sup­port for heaps of exten­sions and themes, etc. etc.

It’s just that it seems that most peo­ple are afraid of change, what am I say­ing, every­one is afraid of change at some point. I won’t dis­count their fear of change, but rather men­tion that they should wel­come it.

Once we’re too com­fort­able in some­thing, it’s a red flag telling you to add a bit of spice into your lifestyle (be it surf­ing habits, your favorite book­store or brick and mor­tar shop, food tastes, etc.), change is good.

by kartooner on May 25, 2004 at 11:45 pm. Reply #

Hey Erik,

I’ve tried to play the web stan­dards evan­ge­list at our work­place — even show them the virtues of Fire­fox, etc. Response was along the lines of “tried it a cou­ple of times, it’s fun” and lit­tle else.

Unfor­tu­nately, web stan­dards by them­selves aren’t some­thing you can use in a sales pitch — the only thing clients care for, under­stand­ably, is that their sites work and look fine on what­ever browser they are using (more often than not, this means IE/PC) and they really won’t give a hoot about what holds it all together as long as it works. Me, what I try to do is to strike a bal­ance for sites to work as flaw­lessly as pos­si­ble in both browsers using web standards.

What is really needed here is some mar­ket­ing mus­cle –and mucho $$$- the size of Microsoft or sim­i­lar (which com­pany is sec­ond most influ­en­tial in the com­put­ing indus­try? Apple? nah..) to get Fire­fox beyond its geek toy sta­tus and posi­tion it as a seri­ous com­peti­tor to IE. But who’s going to pony up the cash, even more so when every­body knows there’s no money to be made in mar­ket­ing browsers?

Microsoft’s own case is one where their dom­i­nance in mar­ket share is fueled by ubiq­uity, not quality…

by beto on May 26, 2004 at 12:05 pm. Reply #

At my cur­rent job no one cares at all about web stan­dards so try­ing to get them to use Fire­fox is a pain. The best thing I’ve found to sell it to peo­ple is “built in pop-up block­ing”. The fact that it doesn’t need an exter­nal pro­gram to do this makes it a lit­tle more entic­ing to people.

The tabbed brows­ing usu­ally catches peo­ples inter­est as well but not enough to move over from IE.

I’ve only suc­cess­fully switched one per­son over to Fire­fox. It’s hard to get peo­ple out of what they’re used to even if it’s a bet­ter product.

by Todd on May 26, 2004 at 12:59 pm. Reply #

There are a few IE based browsers that have tabbed inter­faces, auto­matic pop-up stop­ping and are skinnable.
These are great, but they still ren­der prob­lems. Fire­fox isn’t per­fect and there are a few things it does/doesn’t do that drive me nuts, but it ren­ders pages nicely.

by Scott on May 27, 2004 at 1:41 pm. Reply #

Maybe you’d like to get involved with Inter­na­tional Inter­net Explorer Con­ver­sion Day?

http://richardathome.no-ip.com/index.php?article_id=234

by Richard@Home on May 28, 2004 at 8:58 am. Reply #

Sounds like a well-devised plan, Richard. I’m in. :)

by kartooner on May 28, 2004 at 9:46 am. Reply #

Psst… tell all your friends ;-)

by Richard@Home on May 28, 2004 at 9:58 am. Reply #

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