Call To Arms

Hey you! You in the shirt! Yeah, you with the really cool blog with great content.

You are giving people no incentive for choosing a better browser, thereby making your life easier.

Yeah, you.

In fact, you are working hard to make sure people stay with their jurassic version of Internet Explorer which is making your life harder, and holding the internet back.

Stop it. Please.

It’s curious to see, that the very people who suffer the most from Internet Explorers dominance of the web, are also the people who work the hardest to maintain this dominance.

The honorable, skilled, veteran web developer spends a ungodly amount of time trying to work around the bugs and the agedness of Internet Explorer.

Meanwhile, the good-for-nothing hack or corporate whore is either too stupid or uses the “IE is almost everyone, so I might as well code for that” excuse (which is also, let’s face it, too stupid). They make their site for Internet Explorer only, and thereby shit all over everyone who works hard to make the web a good place. Including the ones who actually built the web, who are a bunch of unix users.

It happens right under the nose of the vast majority of users. They think nothing of it at all, or they might even think that people who are advocating standards with passion are a bunch of zealots, making a big deal about nothing.

It sort of reminds me of the situation Richard Dreyfuss finds himself in the movie “What About Bob?”. He plays a psychiatrist named Leo Marvin.
In this movie, Bob (Bill Murray) is a neurotic mental patient who stalks Dr. Marvin to his vacation home. Everything Bob does makes the family think he’s a great guy, while Richard Dreyfuss ends up looking like a big prick in every situation.
So maybe he’s a bit high strung in the movie, but the situation is frustrating.

The most common answer I hear to why people don’t use Firefox is that many of the sites they visit don’t look right in mozilla.

That’s hardly surprising, since all the skilled people are spending twice as long fixing their site up so it works in old crap browsers like Internet Explorer.

Do you think that’s fair?
I sure as hell don’t.

The professional developer can obviously not afford to ignore the IE audience, so the following is not directed at them. Not that they are not guilty (they probably claimed to their boss that making a site that works in IE and most other browsers requires maintenance of two separate versions of the site), but the decision might be out of their hands.

The blogging community, on the other hand, are also a bunch of really skilled people, and they don’t loose money when people don’t look at their site.

I suggest that all of you super skilled blog-designers out there design your website how it ought to look, for a standard compliant browser.

Next time you redesign your site, go nuts with attribute selectors, transparent PNGs, the proper CSS box model and all those sexy CSS3 features that you are having wet dreams about.
Only fix up errors in IE that are so bad that you can’t use the site at all.
Let it stay ugly as hell in IE.
Make a prominent statement on your website that it looks better in a standards compliant browser (pick your favorite and plug that).

Maybe a few people will try out a browser which has been actively developed in recent years.