sandwichesandapples

We had a brief discussion via email around the office today. The head of our UI team sent everyone a link to a new .png (I pronounce it “ping”) fix for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). I know for the non-webby it still sometimes comes as a surprise that IE is so despised by web developers but here it is: IE is crappy and here’s one reason. A .png is a type of graphic file like a .jpg (“jay-peg”) or .gif (“gif”). IE doesn’t render transparent .pngs correctly so designers must employ a hack to make this very common file format work in this very common browser.

One of our designers responded with another Microsoft complication to avoid. I responded, “Avoid Microsoft. Period.” Which got a response like “Oh, I heard you don’t like IE. If only you can convince billions of people to stop using it…” Har har.

But it got me thinking… how better to convince the majority of users to stop using IE than by having designers simply stop supporting it? I’ve joked about this in the past but I’m getting really serious about it. There’s no need to disable websites viewed in IE but why not simply add a conditional comment¹ that alerts users “You are using an inferior browser and parts of this webpage will render incorrectly. Please consider using Firefox, Flock, Safari, Opera or pretty much anything else.”

I mean, once users see .pngs rendered with that stupid blue halo that IE creates won’t they start to think, “ugh, this site looks like shit in this browser,” and check out a new browser? If my television started to show stupid blue halos around people, I’d think about getting a new one. I wouldn’t blame Will and Grace.

But instead designers bend over backwards — actually more than backwards since we sometimes create completely new stylesheets and code to accommodate IE — to make sure sites render the same across all browsers. Why? We’re the ones creating the sites that people are visiting, not Microsoft. So if sites look like hell in Microsoft’s product, and users are told that’s why they look like hell, then maybe they’ll move on or Microsoft will improve.

Even though we curse IE, we act as though this problem is ours because it affects our users’ experience — we think if users are looking at our sites in IE, then we must accommodate. But the truth is that our users have choice just like they do when choosing a stereo or a TV. If a record sounds like garbage through cheap speakers, a user doesn’t curse the record; he shops for new speakers.

We’re making the music here. Microsoft makes the cheap speakers.

¹ “conditional comments” are code that only IE recognizes allowing designers to target IE. In other words, Microsoft knows their browser doesn’t behave like it should and they’ve provided a programmatic way for designers to isolate code to fix IE’s bugs.