Leyton JayDec 14th, 2007 - 13:53:10

As a Web Developer for Rentokil-Initial (a multi-national corporation with websites in 79 countries and 40+ languages) I find Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) to have extremelly poor support for established web standards.

These include proper rendering of CSS2 (a coding standard for presentation) and accessibility features for the visually disabled (such as and . As a Web Developer I prefer to use Mozilla Firefox as this validates my pages/applications at the W3C and displays web pages as I intend. I often use Opera to further test this, thought it's rendering engine is not as true to web standards. We then have to go through the ardue of making entirely different 'hack' stylesheets to make the pages look good in Internet Explorer because it has a perverse way of rendering pages. This doubles my development time and is in a way pandering to Microsoft and perpetuating their rein.

I long for the day when IE either becomes a thing of the past or standards-compliant but at the moment the later is a complete oxy-moron.

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Bottom LineDec 15th, 2007 - 14:44:24

When you buy a GM vehicle, it comes with an AC Delco radio. If you want the Ford version, you have to do that after the sale. Leave Microsoft alone. Windows is a product. You are not forced to buy or use it. You have alternatives.

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Leyton JayDec 17th, 2007 - 09:49:11

It's all very well saying 'leave Microsoft alone' but it's products are now ubiquitous in our society and with great power comes great responsibility!

Everyone knows there are other manufacturers of cars, they've been around for over a century but many computer users are ignorant of alternatives to Microsoft because of their monopoly. You can't really compare the two industries. I've worked as an IT Helpdesk Support Agent and I can tell you from experience that many, many internet users dont know what the term 'browser' means, they simply view IE as 'THE way to surf the web' - they've never heard of or imagined alternatives. They implicitly trust Microsoft and they trust the blue E on the desktop. Microsoft do their best to perpetuate this ignorance as a way of covering up IE's failings.

Microsoft won BROWSER WAR I based on public ignorance; but winning BROWSER WAR II will be harder as the public are now much now internet-savy!

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HuhDec 17th, 2007 - 22:36:06

'users are ignorant of alternatives to Microsoft because of their monopoly nd I can tell you from experience that many, many internet users dont know what the term 'browser' means, they simply view IE as 'THE way to surf the web' - they've never heard of or imagined alternatives. They implicitly trust Microsoft and they trust the blue E on the desktop.'

'winning BROWSER WAR II will be harder as the public are now much now internet-savy!'

Contradiction, much?

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C'mon..think!Dec 18th, 2007 - 09:43:41

C'mon you know what I mean. Or did I really have to add the paragraph about the difference between SURFERS and USERS???

16-30yr olds often really know the internet, walking around in Firefox and Opera tshirts (SURFERS), all with MySpaces and FaceBooks. While most other people simply click the blue E and hope for the best (USERS).

It's this first group that are really pushing alternative browsers to the second group and trying to broaden their horizons. And the first group is ever expanding.

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