Hey Mono: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

[DontSayBanana]

Killing IE can only make web design and development faster and more productive.  IE's problems fall into three main categories.

1) IE's low speed.  It's not just bogging down the browser, it's bogging down man-hours of development time.  IE performs so poorly, but still has so much corporate market share, that hours are being wasted just on figuring out and implementing prefetching techniques to lower loading times.  When your browser is so slow that there's a separate set of scripts and hacks just to deal with it, it's a failure.

2) Little to no standards compliance.  When Internet Explorer finally gets around to drawing the page, it's probably not going to look the way the designer intended- unless even more man-hours are being wasted on IE-specific hacks (especially margins and padding- IE's got a nasty habit of spacing out things that aren't supposed to be apart and collapsing things that are supposed to be together).  Once again, wasted production time and the browser is a complete failure- they're called standards for a reason.

3) ActiveX controls.  Internet Explorer is *not* the only browser that still uses ActiveX- sort of.  Opera can be configured to allow ActiveX usage, but guess what?  It runs more slowly and with more glitches when ActiveX controls are enabled.  For almost any public site, ActiveX controls should be considered a no-no, since the programmer has no way of knowing whether the client has ActiveX support or not, meaning lots of code redundancy doing the same thing in a more universal way, like PHP and Javascript.

The problem is the bigger the company, the more it's invested into the software it's using (and will have to invest in upgrading), so the slower it will be to accept change in the software world.  My PC repair teacher had horror stories (in 2010) about some companies that had invested so heavily in software for their companies that they were still stuck using Windows 3.1.  The same is true of IE6-IE8; a lot of really large companies spent a lot of money using those to heavily tailor their company intranets, and the way they build relationships and contracts with vendors has prevented them from exploring better, cheaper options using more generally-accepted current technology.  For example, it's relatively expensive to maintain a repository of QuickTime-format training videos on an IE8-compatible legacy website, while the videos could be converted to MPEGs and played in a browser running purely HTML5 code for a weekend's worth of work... except that the ERP vendors have nice cushy contracts that haven't expired, so they don't really have any incentive to put any development work into the site.

It started going away when Microsoft finally announced they're no longer supporting Windows XP (the last Windows OS that could run IE6 without heavy modification), but change will still be slow, because Vista gained almost no market share and Windows 7 is a much younger platform.

[Monoriu]

Seems to me a lot of the problems listed are on the developer/IT side of things rather than the retail, consumer, user side. 

[Eddie Teach]

But really, the browser can't go faster.  There is basically no loading time.

That's probably because of your 350 Mbps connection.

Though even with a twentieth of that, it's rare I'll notice a difference between page loading times on different browsers. I use Chrome because the AdBlock plugin works so well.

[viper37]

Ugh, many Navy sites work better with IE, some only work with IE.

Don't remind me.  The fucking government needs to get their web design standards out of the 90s.

it's the same with Quebec & Canada's government, most sites asks for IE 7.0 or something.  Most still work anyway, though.