Is Internet Explorer becoming the web browser for idiots?

Ever since the bad old days of the Browser Wars in the 1990's it has been a major pain to code up websites that are displayed correctly in different browsers. Right now the pain is spreading like a bad rash, and in order to ensure cross-browser compliance for a website with even moderately rich design elements, one has to test it in all the mainstream browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. They all have their particular quirks and problems, especially where CSS support is concerned. But it gets worse: right now we have to content with not one but two mainstream versions of IE, to wit, IE7 and IE8, both of which render pages in wildly different manners. With IE9 coming up but still deeply in beta and not running on the still widely prevalent Windows XP, this won't change anytime soon.

And of course if you want to test a website with multiple versions of IE, you'll either need multiple computers, or resort to virtual machines, since running multiple versions of IE on a single Windows installation is, to all practical intents and purposes, a shortcut to insanity. Microsoft's SuperPreview does include the IE6 rendering engine, but for this to be a viable solution it would have to duplicate all the bugs and glitches in all IE versions 100% accurately, which it does not. And to add insult to injury, Microsoft expects you to buy this tool, with of course comes as part of a bundle of stuff you don't necessarily want - not to mention that it is essentially intended as a work-around for the mess they themselves created in the first place. Aargh.

The interesting thing, though, is the current usage figures for IE. According to the W3 Schools browser statistics the overall usage of IE has dwindled to around 30%, but (and this is where it gets interesting) only just over half of that accounts for the current version, IE8. The rest is divided almost equally between IE7 and IE6. In other words, half the IE user community runs a version of IE that is either one or two releases out of date!

This suggests that the IE user community is rapidly being reduced to the clueless and the careless. Which is not surprising, really, but it is interesting to see the statistics bear it out.

Oh IE, how I hate thee

Now that I have a little work again, I am immediately confronted once more with the nightmare that is Microsoft Internet Explorer. Right now I'm struggling with a website that looks fine in Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but gets stuffed up in three different ways by IE. In IE7 there are gaps between images everywhere, in IE8 there is a huge space right over the top menu, and in the same IE8 but now in "compatibility mode" (which artificially re-introduces some of the bugs of IE7, but not all of them and not in quite the same way) things break in a different manner still. While I think one can get away with ignoring IE6 by now (mad dogs and Englishmen not withstanding) my biggest concern is IE9, which will only run on Windows Vista and Windows 7, both of which I have no intention of installing on any of my systems ever if I can possibly help it.

So. The old nightmare is once again compounded by an ongoing proliferation of IE versions, none of which have the same bugs but all of which have their own quirks in plenty, which not only requires testing of each web page in all versions of IE and cumbersomely working around the many quirks and brain damage in that particular version, but also often necessitates different versions of style sheets, scripting and what not for each version! And of course you cannot run multiple version of IE (at least not as proper, "clean" installs) on the same system - unless you're willing to put up with multiple Windows versions in separate Virtual Machines, which sucks more than any vacuum ever abhorred by Nature.

Aargh.