Why I Care about IE

It's easy to get upset about IE ...but we must remember that this product took the lead when standards flowed about as fast as frozen treacle. It was also the first to be highly programmable. It gained market share from zilch to just about all.

Now it looks like the plug has not been pulled. Maybe the development team can factor in the unrecorded time the product costs web developers. Here are some instances that may be of interest. (It wouldn't be hard to develop metrics that estimate the pain (and resulting grudge) that developers feel.)

* Although issues with other browsers do sometimes slow down development, bugs in Internet Explorer are the hardest to figure out because they are the most illogical. Internet Explorer wastes the most time per day for our company.
* I spent hours pretty often checking web pages across browsers. IE is most important but there are others that I check. When I get a bug I've got to fix it. Many hours x Many developers = Costly.
* HTML+ TIME does a great job. It also turns out to be unavailable in some installations (an airline "club" lounge had machines that all lacked it!!).
* VML looked good. Time is spent figuring out how it works. Then we notice no publicity or information about it. Drop it. Time wasted.
* We make quality XHTML. Another MS tool is used to process the content in some way (Visual Studio, Word, MSHTML...). Result badly fouled content. Sometimes it's even turned into illegal markup. Result humungous cost in writing code to fix the foulness when you absolutely must round trip. MSHTML that produced legal XHTML would be very good.
* Javascript time functions have their fundamental meaning changed when the millenium passes. Result client side code using the functions no longer works as expected. Talk about a deliberately generated Y2K problem!! Next result fix the code and FTP around the world changing web sites. No charge. Somebody is taking money out my pocket! Please never again.
* A style sheet displays incorrectly, but only in a frame. A few hours of work shows that the problem occurs when a list (ul or ol) appears on the page. When that occurs the page width gets too big so a scroll bar appears. Things like this "drive me nuts" as Eric Lippert is fond of saying.
* Our content on a major portal site breaks due to a bug in Internet Explorer only. There's no way to track down what's happening except trial and error, and searching Google. Whereas in Firefox, we just usually view the DOM and find out what's happening.
* We are implementing a new feature, we tell the client partner we're almost done (which appeared to be true), then a strange DOM bug in Internet Explorer when trying to put the final piece together causes us to have to push back the project 3 days. We have to do some really wacky IE hack to get it working. These kinds of things don't usually happen in other browsers .