Internet Explorer Is Holding Back The Web
If you follow any of the big blogger/news sites or any tech sites, you’ve probably seen articles mentioning newer technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 or Webkit. Adobe Flash is going away, they’ve stopped releasing updates, iOS and Android Chrome don’t even support it, so we’re moving in a new direction. HTML is the language that all basically all web sites/pages are constructed upon, it’s the code that explains what is on the page, where it goes, what type of information it is, where to place images, etc. CSS is a language that accompanies HTML and it tells the web browser how to make the HTML look (what fonts to use, how things are colored, if there are borders, etc). The latest two languages of these combined give us the ability to make breathtaking web pages that render fast and don’t require the visitor to cache/download a slew of images from the site in order to the view page, you also don’t need to wait for some heavy Flash object to load. So, what’s the problem? The title of this article is “Internet Explorer Is Holding Back The Web”, right? Well Internet Explorer (IE for short), doesn’t support Webkit, it doesn’t support all the latest changes to CSS3 and has some serious problems rendering certain parts of HTML5. Webkit is a technology that allows us to really make things look fantastic and also gives us some great functionality, with these 3 technologies tied together we have the ability to make really wonderfully engaging, interactive and visually stunning web sites, but when around 29% of the web is still using Internet Explorer (see this Wikipedia article for the stats), you have to make something that is cross compatible, that looks the same no matter what type of browser/device you’re using. So, we’re forced to build sites that do not look as good as they could or maybe aren’t as interactive as they could be. As a web developer this is very frustrating, we want to build the best possible sites we can, but we’re held back because Microsoft is still behind the times (even with version 10 of IE, which was released in September 2012).
With usage of Internet Explorer dwindling we’re starting to wonder how much longer we need to consider Internet Explorer worth supporting to a point where it holds back design. Yes, there are ways around these things with JavaScript, use of images, etc, but that is not the point. Why should we continue to develop sites that have a lesser design/functionality because 29% of the population might not be able to use it/see it? It’s a fine line, imagine your brick-and-mortar location automatically ignoring 29% of the customers that walk in the door, not a pretty or sane thought. At a certain point IE must get with the times or go away almost completely, and then you’ll see a revolution on the web.