noted on Mon, 09 Aug 2004
MSIE 7 Shipping Earlier than Longhorn?
So I was checking out Slashdot the other day, and came across this article about how MSIE 7 might be shipped before Longhorn, and I must admit to being totally confused.
See, I thought the party line from most web developers was that — let me put this diplomatically — MSIE shouldn’t be recommended or endorsed. Ever. There are a lot of good reasons, like the security issues, the lack of proper and complete PNG (and CSS) support, and I’m sure there are others I’m not recalling.
So, when Microsoft decided that the resulting massive migration away from their browser (and as a web developer, I must say I missed that memo) was bad enough that some action needed to be taken Right Now, they decided to ask us what we wanted fixed in MSIE. That’s a reasonable course of action to take.
So I’d like to put a question to those of you who were toeing the aforementioned party line: Why did you answer them?!? Maybe my background as an artist has enabled me to learn a thing or two the rest of the world didn’t. Here’s a clue: the best way to ruin someone’s chances of success isn’t to hate them. No, the best way to screw someone is to ignore them.
So, thanks to you guys, the day of writing HTML/JavaScript/CSS once, and trusting it’ll work on everything has just been pushed that much further into the future.
But then again, maybe that was the smartest thing ever. Now that I’m in business for myself, I can see that this kind of situation only means that the real losers aren’t the web developers (the good ones anyway) but our clients, because they need to pay us to develop compatible solutions.
UPDATE: Geez, I didn’t even read the comments in that Slashdot article (I did skim the article it linked to, though!) Seems like the ‘mass migration’ claim may have been slightly overstated.