4 ms·

Ask HN: Will Internet Explorer borwser ever get insignificant to world?

As a web developer my life has turned into a misery when I need to write separate for for IE6 IE7 and IE8. The so called higher versions doesnt seem to be backward compatible. Adherence to w3c standards is in disarray which makes it difficult to run firefox targeted code on IE. To add to all these problems the IE developer toolbar sucks a big time (literaly). I can imagine the hours I have wasted figuring out where is the error in my javascript with IE. PNG transparency is missing in IE6. Despite of all these problems IE is said to rule the market. how ? What does statistics suggest ? Will it ever get so insignificant that clients would stop demanding compatibility with IE? Is that going to come in my lifetime?

thristian 17y ago
Mozilla's Asa Dotzler recently posted an interesting bit about Internet Explorer's market share: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/milestone_weeke.html http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/mileston... IE will always be significant while Microsoft and Windows remain significant, but the news isn't all bad - IE7 is more standards-compliant than IE6 was, and IE8 is even more standards-compliant again, so it'll be much easier to make site designs that don't turn to crap in IE as time goes on. If Windows 7 gains any significant traction, putting IE8 onto people's desktops and removing the IE6 option, things will get better even faster. Look on the bright side; things could be worse - you could have to make pages work in IE 5.5 as well.
ScottWhigham 17y ago
I have four seperate CSS files for our site - one for everyone and one each for IE6, IE7, and IE8. The IE6 file is huge compared to IE7 and IE8 so that's the one I care about. I save my graphics as GIFs so that I can avoid the IE6 PNG transparency issue but IE7 and IE8 render those fine. So for me I care about "When will IE6 die?" I figure that I'll be able to completely get rid of it in about two years. Will IE ever go away? No - that's just silly. They have a 3/4 market share so why would MSFT want that to go away?

thristian 17y ago

Mozilla's Asa Dotzler recently posted an interesting bit about Internet Explorer's market share: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/milestone_weeke.html http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/mileston... IE will always be significant while Microsoft and Windows remain significant, but the news isn't all bad - IE7 is more standards-compliant than IE6 was, and IE8 is even more standards-compliant again, so it'll be much easier to make site designs that don't turn to crap in IE as time goes on. If Windows 7 gains any significant traction, putting IE8 onto people's desktops and removing the IE6 option, things will get better even faster. Look on the bright side; things could be worse - you could have to make pages work in IE 5.5 as well.

ScottWhigham 17y ago

I have four seperate CSS files for our site - one for everyone and one each for IE6, IE7, and IE8. The IE6 file is huge compared to IE7 and IE8 so that's the one I care about. I save my graphics as GIFs so that I can avoid the IE6 PNG transparency issue but IE7 and IE8 render those fine. So for me I care about "When will IE6 die?" I figure that I'll be able to completely get rid of it in about two years. Will IE ever go away? No - that's just silly. They have a 3/4 market share so why would MSFT want that to go away?