Does the Internet Explorer team ever think about the daily pain they inflict on the world’s web designers?
Maybe they’re assuming that IE’s user experience only happens when someone is sitting at a computer, surfing with IE. That’s a good assumption for “normal” users, but for designers the UX happens every time the boss says “it has to look the same in IE”. It happens every time we have to write custom CSS for IE, and it makes us remember every time we’ve had to Google crap like “box model hack“, “white space bug“, or “conditional comments“. The IE user experience happens when we have to run scary looking hacks, or — God help us — have a separate Windows machine, just to test different versions of Microsoft’s broken browser.
See, the user experience doesn’t just happen while someone is using a product. There’s always spillover. With Internet Explorer I think about the precious hours of our lives wasted, the power consumed by the rows of old “browser testing” computers that every office has, and I want to grab the IE team by the lapels and shout “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!”
And now IE8 is coming and it doesn’t support CSS rounded corners. Sounds like a silly thing to worry about, right? No big deal?
Wrong. See, each version of IE is like a non biodegradable landfill diaper. IE6 came out almost eight years ago and we’re just now talking about whether it’s okay to stop coding for it. IE8′s little CSS shortcoming means we’re doomed to slice images into rounded corners for years.
There wouldn’t be a problem if Microsoft released new versions of IE more frequently, or if they could somehow update IE’s rendering engine as easily as pushing a security patch, but right now too many users only upgrade browsers when they buy a new computer.
What to do about IE? Well, every designer I know publicly derides IE and encourages others to abandon it. The good news is that it’s working, but we’ll still have to deal with IE’s long, toxic half-life.