As a web designer it should be no surprise to most of you that I hate abhor want to stab with a rusty knife don’t generally like Internet Explorer. The reasons are well known but can be boiled down to this: There are governing bodies whose job it is to create standards for HTML and CSS. Web browsers are programs which are meant to take that code, and read it in accordance with the standards created by those bodies. IE shits all over the code and does whatever it wants. This is a problem for web designers because it means that after we code a page correctly, we have to go back and include all manner of nasty workarounds for it to work in IE (which has the lion’s share of usage on the web). Since IE6, regarded as easily one of the worst browsers ever, the team at Microsoft has been playing catch-up. Their dilemma now is that they can make a standards-compliant browser, but it would take all that IE specific code we wrote in the past and render it wrong.

I am not the first person to complain about IE, nor will I be the last. I won’t go into detail about what they’ve done wrong and why they’re trying to fix it and how. Instead I want to pose a question. Why do they try? I don’t mean that in the “Micro$oft is teh sux0rs, dey shud give up” kind of way that’s present on the internet. What I mean is: What does Microsoft gain from having the browser with the largest market share?

It’s free, so they don’t get any money from it directly (and it should be noted that essentially all browsers are free software). They don’t gain brand loyalty from it: It comes installed on every Windows installation, and until recently was automatically made the default browser. The majority of their users aren’t choosing IE, they simply don’t care to browse (excuse the pun) the market for other options, or even realize that other options exist.

I should talk about other browsers briefly. Safari is Apple’s browser. If you own a Mac, chances are you use this, or at least did for a long time. It’s fast. Really fast. It’s also very uncluttered and easy to use. Firefox has been the golden boy for a very long time. It tends to be ahead of the game, and has an immense library of add-ons. If you like customizability, then you like Firefox. Chrome is new to the game, but it was made by Google so it’s hardly an underdog. It offers some really novel features, supports add-ons, and also tries to stay ahead of the game. What these three have in common, and IE completely lacks, is a unique identity. They each do something a bit different and they all pride themselves on innovation, refinement and standards compliancy. Personally I’ve used all four (as well as mid-nineties AOL, but we don’t talk about that anymore). Whichever browser I’m using I can always miss some feature of another browser except for IE. There just isn’t anything unique (in a good way) to miss!

So back to the question at hand: Why does Microsoft continue to develop and push IE? One of the things Microsoft is proud of, and flaunts in the face of Mac users, is it’s compatibility with a wide range of software on the market. So why in this one case would they hide good options behind their lackluster, security hole prone piece of software? I suspect it does in fact have to do with branding, but if that’s the case wouldn’t the better solution be to let people know there are option and make theirs the best? In the past, when the internet was still a novelty (sometime in the mid-nineties again), it was a very good idea for Microsoft to package IE in Windows as it gave people an easy way to get online. Nowadays everyone and everything has internet access and the choices of how to connect are limitless. IE is no longer needed nor is it welcome. If Microsoft wants to keep making IE then make it good. I’d love to see them pull themselves out of the gutter, but I just don’t see it happening.

Currently Safari, Firefox and Chrome all have at least some support for HTML5. IE does not. To be fair, HTML5 is not a standard yet, so maybe the other three browsers shouldn’t support it for now, but the rumors are that IE9 will add support so Microsoft obviously realizes that it will be the new standard soon. When that happens IE will once again be playing catch-up because it hasn’t played around with the possibilities like the others have been doing for a while. IE, I weep for you.