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February 20, 2003
The browser wars
I just started a huge argument with my friends about whether or not Internet Explorer is the better browser or not. I will go ahead and say right now that IE is not the better browser. It does however seem to provide a better browsing experience for the end user. I use the word seem because it is a fact more pages render better in IE than in the other browsers like Mozilla. The argument here is not that IE is superior, its that IE being backed by M$ is able to force its will onto the web community. They do this by making IE just every so slightly non standards compliant. In order for websites to look correct in IE, developers purposefully write broken code (I know this is true cause this used to be my job). This makes standards compliant browsers like Mozilla render the page incorrectly. This makes the general user think Mozilla sucks and IE is good, hence IE remains the prevalent browser.
This bugs me a lot. I will concede that IE will give you a better browsing experience but it is only because of the underhanded way M$ forced its weight on the web community. Also IE is integrated in the OS which means they can make things more spiffy like font rendering and what-not.
Anyway this whole thing got started because I was helping Roger with his redesign. He had his site working and looking perfect in everything except IE 6. This is a direct result of what I said above, IE 6 does not conform to the standards hence it renders different that all the other browsers which are standards compliant. But this leads back to the basic problem, Roger knows that probably 80% of the people surfing the web and his site are using IE so he has to make it work for IE.
Posted by Scott at February 20, 2003 09:44 AM