Anything but

It just goes to show how much personal experience can influence opinion and not necessarily in the right direction, because whilst Internet Explorer 6 is a stinky browser I can understand (there’s a lot of understanding in this post) how it got there. Back in the day Microsoft were quite an innovative company and IE was an innovative product - oh yes it was! As Obi Wan in my obligatory Star Wars reference might say, it’s “true, from a certain point of view”. Forging ahead instead of waiting for consensus from newly emerging standards bodies can be seen as perfectly valid when there’s only you and Netscape on the scene. Unfortunately Microsoft carried on in this vein right up to, and some would argue beyond, version 6. God help us all.

Tobias wrote a challenging post a while back explaining why he temporarily switched off IE access to one page on his site. Though it struck me at the time as being a little severe I understood the frustration, mainly because it wasn’t the first time I’d heard people complain. I only recollect this as I recently found myself writing a little code - ‘code’ as in tinkering with the blog because I don’t have a life - and hit the ‘it looks fine in everything but’ problem with Microsoft’s browser. I think that was when I really understood the frustration – ‘understood’ as in wanting to burn Internet Explorer, more specifically IE6, to the ground; too severe, right?