Thurrott vs. IE 7: “I Hate You”

Posted on August 7, 2006
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When Window’s #1 fanboy Paul Thurrott gets this harsh on an impending Microsoft product you know the thing must be in brutal shape. His take on the latest IE 7 beta:

Microsoft blames backward-compatibility problems for the stalemate over true Web standards compatibility. Put succinctly, the company has gone its own way for so long and now has to support so many developers who use nonstandard Web technologies that it will be impossible to make IE Web-standards-compliant without breaking half the commercial Web sites on the planet.
- IE 7.0 Technical Changes Leave Web Developers, Users in the Lurch

Disappointing. He continues:

My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It’s a cancer on the Web that must be stopped.

I absolutely agree with that last statement. My biased, “I hate IE” opinion is that roughly 70% of all web dev time spent on dynamic websites that are intended to be cross-platform and cross-browser is spent making the site conform to IE 6, working around its thousands of bugs, and finding ways to hack functionality that doesn’t cause it barf up the dog’s breakfast.

(To those who only browse in IE on Windows and argue “It’s not that bad, everything looks good to me”, you have no idea how much work the rest of us do to make sure your worldview remains comfortable. The simplest test you can do: create an unordered list with a single list item. Style a margin and padding with CSS. View in IE and any standards-compliant browser. Note the differences.)

Amusingly the comments to Thurrott’s article* seem to largely misunderstand his point, with ones such as this one suggesting that it is the HTML on the website that is to blame and somehow IE is a hapless victim doing the best it can:

If a website doesn’t meet web standards in how it is HTMLed and coded, is that Microsoft’s fault?

That clueless poster then continues:

It is up to the website owners to make sure that their public websites are coded to public standards. MSIE offers many technologies that as “extras”, but thoses were really meant for “in house” use.

Would it be too inflammitory to say that this myopic perspective is endemic in the Windows-only geek zealot crowd? (I intentionally differentiate here between this hard-core Windows-only power-user crowd and the general Windows-using public on purpose: the fault here is with the zealot not the user). I think it is. It smacks of “it’s the stupid user’s fault, who use something they’re not supposed to”, a mentality I find particularly loathsome. It’s also extremely dismissive of the crux of the article: Thurrott is not talking about ActiveX or COM, he’s arguing about basic CSS, the very foundation of the web.

Our intrepid “stupid users” poster finishes with:

It’s the responsibility of the website owners to comply with web standards.

And indeed it is. And every web developer I know, to a person, tries to do this. And it is absolutely impossible for them to do if they include IE 6 and IE 7 users as part of their target audience. Impossible.

Me, I stopped testing IE on Windows against my personal sites long, long ago. I can’t be bothered to spent the hours of my life required to make them work with it. Instead, I hope the Windows world continues to discover Firefox and Opera and, what the hell, even Netscape.

(*Update: the clued-in comments now seem to be outweighing the clueless comments. Thank you mob rule.)

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