St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Microsoft released the beta 2 version of it’s Internet Explorer the other day. In my opinion its a users nightmare. Besides the thousands of stability problems, bugs and it’s inability to run along side just about any firewall or other security software, it has several flaws that will make things harder for the end user and it’s “MS” flavor of support for flash and CSS is designed to force web designers and developers into choosing between writing code MS internet explorer or all the other web browsers.

Even I have to mostly overlook the numerous reports of bug crashes ¹, as this is only a beta version and that’s what beta versions are for. Given Microsoft’s history though, it’s hard to imagine that they care whether their software works well with a firewall. In fact the firewall makers will probably have to change their product and I bet the thing that is causing problems with the firewall is the outbound traffic thing. Like Windows Media Player – which tries to “phone home” every time a file or list of files is played, users will have 3 choices (if they have a good firewall):

1. Let the software connect whenever to wherever it likes (it WILL connect to servers besides the server that has the file you are trying to play).
2. Never let it connect (not very handy for a web browser)
3. Decide each and every time it tries to connect.

Like with Windows Media Player now, these are not attractive choices and you can almost be certain which option most people will choose.

For the Web Design Community and the Software Development community, the implication of MS’s non-support of standards are far reaching and devastating. Imagine these choices:

• Write pages and scripts and programs that work for IE7 only
• Write pages that work with most browsers
• Write very very plain pages

We Web Designers have sorta had this problem in the past with the spotty support of standards by MS. When they came out and said yes they would support standards if Netscape and the others would, and no, they wouldn’t add proprietary features if the others wouldn’t, waited for the others to release their browsers and then released IE5 with shoddy support for standards and tons of proprietary features, it cost us huge percentages of time (especially at first) making our web sites and programs work in all browsers.

This time it will be far far worse.

Oh you want specifics don’t you? You want pointed evidence that “proves” the badness MS is up to. Well ok, stay tuned here and I will write about the specifics later.

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