Web Browsers Revisited

As a designer, some days there just aren’t words for how much I hate Internet Explorer 6. It is the least standards-compliant browser still massively in use; which is a nice way of saying that it seems to goes out of its way to misinterpret even the simplest piece of html.

And yet it stubbornly remains as one of the three most popular browsers. To give you some idea, there are really three browsers being used by the vast majority of the Windows-using browsing public out there; IE6, it’s successor IE7; and Mozilla’s Firefox. As of May 2008, the breakdown goes like this: IE6 27.3%; IE7 26.5%; and Firefox 39.8%. IE7 is hot on the heels of 6, and of course will sooner of later will become the more popular of the two. Eventually even Microsoft will stop supporting 6, and that can’t come soon enough.

I realise that at this point I might sound like someone riding a bit of a personal hobbyhorse. But there are real, honest-to-god reasons why the latest browsers are better, besides just making my job easier.

Reasons to upgrade to IE7 (or better still Firefox):