Why IE, why?

With the recent news that Opera is moving to the open source Web Kit rendering engine, only one question remains – why hasn’t Microsoft followed suit with Internet Explorer? Internet Explorer has been using the Trident rendering engine since before the dawn of time, and it has been constantly plagued with layout issues and inconsistencies with W3C standards. As a web agency, it is our duty to ensure that all of the websites that we produce are fully compatible with browsers back to IE7. However, without fail, during the testing stage of a website, something will break in one version of Internet Explorer or another.

Supporting Internet Explorer this far back comes with its own set of problems – we can’t use CSS3 to its full extent, and HTML5 support is limited. It does occasionally feel that, as web developers, the existence and continued use of older versions of Internet Explorer is a ball around our combined ankles. There are, of course, tools to help with supporting more modern technologies in older browsers such as modernizr.js and html5shiv, but all of these are JavaScript files, which renders (…get it?) the website next to useless if the user is using an older version of Internet Explorer with JavaScript disabled. .

Web Kit is now widely used on both desktop and mobile platforms, including Safari and Chrome (and their mobile counterparts). As far as I can see, this is the direction which the web is moving in. It is updated constantly and backed by some of the web’s largest companies, including Apple and Google. Gecko (Mozilla’s layout engine) is also updated multiple times a year. In contrast, Internet Explorer still follows a somewhat prehistoric update schedule, meaning that support for any new technologies is always a fair way off for Internet Explorer users. .

Perhaps this is just the web developer in me being selfish, but does a standardised combined approach to HTML rendering not make sense? Of course, in the meantime we will continue to build websites which work cross-platform!