I just need to rant a little bit.

I’m working on a web site for a client at the moment.

As a general rule I develop my sites in Firefox, not just because it’s my default browser, but also because it’s a rock-solid web standards compliant browser. This way I can be almost completely guaranteed will also work in Safari, Chrome, Opera, and indeed anything else.

Anything except Internet Explorer.

The difficult part comes once I’ve finished a wev site, and have to hack it to bits to get it in any semblance of order for IE. Consider today’s ensenble of problems:

  • Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t work. It displays the page fine, but whenever you click anything it has a fit, pops up a message saying it has to display the page in “Compatibility mode” before breaking completely.
  • Internet Explorer 7 also appears to display fine, but shortly after loading will get stuck in a loop, lock up the browser, and display a really unhelpful error. Some Googling seems to suggest that this is a problem with Internet Explorer 7 itself, and I might need to reinstall it.
  • Internet Explorer 6 works fine, believe it or not, aside the fact that everything on-screen looks like a dog’s breakfast. The images are all wrong, the display is about five pixels high, and everything is spilling out over itself.

This is the reason I get so angry at Microsoft, for despite their noble efforts to improve the ancient codebase that is Internet Explorer’s “Trident” engine, it’s still obscenely broken in so many ways.

Not to mention it’s clogged up with all manner of crap these days.

If you’re still using IE, I implore you, give Chrome a go. It’s faster, tidier, and far, far better than Internet Explorer in almost every way. Both of my parents enjoy it, even Dad who’s a bit hesitant of change when it comes to his computer. I bet you’ll like it too.

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.

  1. Posted September 2, 2009

5 Comments

  1. David Jackmanson

    September 2, 2009 17:51

    I’m going to stick with FireFox until Chrome is customiseable, then I’m switching over. I’ve got too used to the way FF works now that I’ve tweaked it to suit me (eg using the search bar on my tweaked version always opens a new tab).

    I think the idea that Chrome is faster will be the best way to get people who don’t care much about geeky things to use it. And maybe always call it “Google Chrome” to get the idea that it’s backed by the biggest name on the Internet?

  2. Ash

    September 2, 2009 18:09

    True enough. I’ll continue to use Firefox for the foreseeable future because I don’t much care for proprietary software, and Chrome runs terribly on Linux.

    It’s still one of the best Windows browsers hands down though, and will be the one I recommend until Firefox picks up its performance.

  3. David Jackmanson

    September 2, 2009 18:27

    Oh yeah. Firefox is such a damn memory hog. I only have 512 meg RAM at the moment and FF slows everything down, takes maybe 80-160 meg of that, and it’s slow. I wouldn’t recommend FF to anyone who wasn’t likely to be interested in doing a lot of tweaking with it.

  4. Owen

    September 4, 2009 0:08

    Chrome will be bundled as the default browser on all Sony laptops in future.

  5. Rants

    September 17, 2009 7:40

    Amen brother. Chrome is were it’s at. The only thing keeping me from migrating permanently from FF to Chrome is lack of decent extensions. Any time I get on someone elses computer and I see them using IE I immediately download chrome for them and do the “which loads faster” test for them. Easy convert.