catholicsphere

[rant on] I hate Internet Explorer. There, I said it. I don’t feel much better, though. Perhaps if I explain my reason for hating IE…

I’ve been doing some evaluation of Content Management Systems for work. One of the things under evaluation is being able to create a custom look and feel around the content on the site. Today, I was looking at Joomla. As I was reading through the documentation for the CMS software, time and again, it talked about the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) hacks that had to be done to workaround the fact that IE doesn’t support the web standards (W3C). The more I read, the more frustrated I became … and I just can’t believe that web developers are standing for this!

As a web developer myself, I’ve come across sites that will check the browser that’s being used and, if it’s not the proper version of IE, it will tell you you need to use IE or upgrade.

Unfortunately, I’ve not seen anything that does the opposite — that tells people that they are using IE and that they need to upgrade to a web standard browser (like Firefox (among others like Safari and Opera).

To make me feel a little better, I’m calling on people to do one of two things (or both if you have the capability).

One … if you use Internet Explorer … upgrade now to Firefox. Not only is Firefox a web standards compliant browser, but it also does a much better job than Internet Explorer at protecting your security and privacy.

The second … if you’re a developer, develop sites that tell people they need to upgrade to a web-standard-compliant browser, such as Firefox.  If IE continues to drop market share, and there are good sites that people can’t browse with their non-compliant IE browser, maybe Microsoft will get a clue and make their browser compliant to save all of us alot of headaches.
In the last 2 years or so that Firefox has been out, it’s gained significant market share on IE. Before, IE used to have about 87% of the market. IE market share has now dropped below 80% … and Firefox has grown to over 14%.

There’s alot to like about Firefox … especially the easy upgrade path and installation that doesn’t even require you to reboot (unlike IE7).

If you’ve been using IE, and recently got Microsoft’s push of IE7, I encourage you to try Firefox. You will love it. And, for those that want to customize things and add productive stuff … there’s plenty of certified plug-ins that can be added to make your surfing more fun and productive.

[/rant off]

[tags]internet, browsers, web, internet explorer, ie, firefox, mozilla, microsoft, market share, joomla, rant, heaven, hell, technology[/tags]