About Internet Explorer

Obviously, I was grown up with Internet Explorer 6. I want to write up about Internet Explorer and why we should love this browser. Internet Explorer always be victim for browser war and no one could tear IE down from browser market share. Its still has good market share until today.

We all know that IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8 has different implementation. There’s known hacks know as conditional comment, but I prefer say conditional comments are not hacking because the condition located inside HTML comments which will successfully validated by W3C Validation tool.

IE 9 has different story. This browser is the first browser implementing hardware acceleration using GPU on browser’s canvas. You will find smooth transition between scroll and animation on good GPU. Internet Explorer 9 not supporting HTML 5 and CSS 3 widely for good reason, both specification are still in draft until this article written.

Internet Explorer are easy to use for beginner despite the browser it self is automatically installed on every Windows. We often meet the same situation, Firefox preinstalled on most Linux OS based distribution such as Ubuntu or Fedora Core. Debian are using rebranding version of Firefox called Iceweasel.  For me, it’s same analogy to open source software, why not major distribution using Chromium or Midori for example. Why apple includes safari on their operating system instead of other browser?

If we say that our code broken in IE 9, then it’s broken to some extend. Remember when we talking about semantic, we don’t need to hack our HTML document. We should play with CSS that’s why conditional comment on IE quite handy without breaking the validation process. If you want all browser have same appearance as we intended then we just need one browser, regardless what is the best on the market.

Just dump IE 6 and we don’t need to over optimize to that browser. Leave PNG as is, don’t need to load htc or PNG hack. IE 6 was born more than decade a go, in computer world it could be specified as a dinosaurs browser. Microsoft it self want to dump IE 6 but the resistance of  most offices to change are another challenge. Why? because it will cost huge money to upgrade massive number of computers into new operating system.

If we talking about website then we shouldn’t have problem to push our user to use Firefox, Opera, Chrome, etc. But in many cases for intranet application, most of them was made to specific browser which is Internet Explorer. Using other browsers will lead to unexpected behavior which lead major business problem. This is one of many factor where management didn’t want to change their de facto browser. Remember, it’s not easy as we thought to change a browser in big organization.

The best bet is still use XHTML doctype if we want our website accessible for wide audience. There’s nothing wrong not to use HTML 5 doctype, HTML 5 still  working draft. Don’t take on pressure about validation when in some case we need to hack our code. HTML is HTML, it’s not special format for electronic data interchange. That’s why XML or even JSON takes place.

Love Internet Explorer like we love other browser. We still need Internet Explorer to grow and flourish our online business. Sadly, I use Google Chrome to write this article.