Internet Explorer is the most widely used browser today, no doubt about it (the numbers don’t lie). However, as alternative browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox continue to eat away at IE’s market share, web designers are not only getting tired of supporting that which cannot be supported, but are also implementing standard features in the browsers they themselves use, the most popular being the CCS3 border-radius property.

Google Chrome (Webkit), Mozilla Firefox (Gecko), and Safari (Webkit) all utilize either direct support for the CSS3 border-radius property, or else provide a proprietary alternative for it, e.g. -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius.

A Flawed Web In Exchange for a Flawed Browser

More and more I am seeing these properties, combined with the soon to be standard border-radius property used in stylesheets throughout the web, and all the while I ask myself how IE users will be able to view those sites in all their glory with non-rounded tabs, divs, buttons, etc.

In addition to the usage of the border-radius property and it’s relatives, there’s also other properties such as the cursor property and other “should be standard in IE but aren’t” properties that fall into the same category.

This lack of support for a difficult browser to begin with has spawned numerous anti-IE browser campaigns, such as the independant Kill Bill’s Browser campaign and the newer WordPress campaign Browse Happy. You can’t visit Google’s homepage with a user-agent containing “MSIE” without seeing a Chrome download link, either.

The Terrible IE Hacks

Internet Exploiter Explorer 8 has proven to be somewhat “better” in rendering standards correctly, but “better” in IE terminology means “We JUST passed the ACID2 test, while everyone else has almost complete support for ACID3″. I’m still not impressed with IE8 overall, as you might have noticed, especially in regards to its horrendous quirks-mode rendering.

Speaking of quirks mode, how many stupid hacks have we “discovered” just to bypass user-agent sniffing in an effort to get IE to render the page the same as every other browser on earth? Quirks mode, .htc files, XML CDATA, and numerous JavaScript hacks are all examples I’ve seen to make a page IE-friendly. Even MSDN acknowledges this problem, with regards to the border-radius issue, with kicker being that they have the audacity to suggest table usage in formatting code.

(If you or a loved one have been tainted into believing that tables are the preferred way to align content, please drop over to our other articles “Optimizing your site for both speed and SEO” and “The Ten Commandments of SEO“, and get help immediately).

It’s Not Just One

There are several versions of Internet Explorer in the wild, and all of them render pages differently than their newer versions (yet still poorly compared to other browsers). IE 4.0 and 5.5 are used by both non-supported Windows 9x and 2000 machines, which are still popular for lesser-duty machines such as Point of Sale devices and kiosks in addition to older PCs.

IE 6.0 is still the default browser of the popular Windows XP SP2 and few will upgrade without the passive help of Windows Update to version 7.0, which contains many of the same flaws (but a prettier interface) save for a few fixes, many of which are also far from perfect in my experiences.

Keep that in mind as you write your CDATA conditionals or server-side user-agent-dependent conditional include statements, which brings us to the next section…

Developmental Cost/Total Cost of Ownership

From a business perspective, the developmental time taken to make a website compatible with Internet Explorer when one is being paid hourly to do so is very expensive, especially in these current economic times.

Maintaining both a CDATA’d stylesheet for Internet Explorer as well as a regular stylesheet for every other browser is just one of many examples of extra developmental time taken to support a crappy series of browsers in the first place.

Supporting IE on the general Internet is a necessary evil, but Intranet developers are very lucky as far as supporting only one browser installed across all internal machines.

Security

Internet Exploiter Explorer has had the worst history of browser exploits compared to every other browser in the world. ActiveX has been a pioneer in exploitive remote code execution, some requiring user consent while other utilize an exploit in IE’s already-flawed rendering engine to accomplish this. The great IFrame exploit of 2006-2007 was a prominent recent example of IE’s security flaws.

The City of Colorado came under major scrutiny for telling users to use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox for browsing their site, for “security reasons”. Come to find out, the webmaster was hosting the website right from his “My Documents” folder, and was brilliant enough to leave backtraces within the error pages that came as a result of him trying to remove the offending pages.

The same website continues to host a page announcing the username/password for their “private” FTP server, which is an outdated and security-flawed piece of FTP software. These are the same people whom claimed Firefox was less secure than Internet Explorer. Right. Take it from a real “expert”, eh?

If you dislike having malicious code/programs executed on your computer just by visiting a web page, then don’t use Internet Explorer. Otherwise, be my (and numerous hackers’) guest.

A Last Note

All of these issues are slowly hurting IE’s market share while bloggers, Myspace users, and general web users take notice of IE’s fundamental flaws more and more. The pressure by various campaigns to switch over to alternatives such as Firefox and Chrome combined with the default browser of Linux distributions and Mac OS X being non-IE are all effective efforts in hurting IE’s market share, and allowing the web to thrive in peace without having to hack around an IE/Trident flaw.