I Love Internet Explorer!
I just want to put this out there since so many people still seem to have a bad relationship with IE. We’ve all been burnt in the past :(
Meh
Those dark days should be well past us now. We all use Macs with Parallels. We all run Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 constantly while designing and developing our sites. Don’t you?
We’ve all pretty much figured out what can and cannot be done in IE, and how to easily get around the biggest problems.
But not just all that, there are actually some really compelling features that are only implemented in Internet Explorer.
Awesome Unique Features
Internet Explorer supports using javascript in your CSS. That’s right. You can define CSS rules using javascript in Internet Explorer!
And then there are the crazy Internet Explorer CSS filters. You can do silly stuff like blurring the main content when you open a lightboxy-thing, but only in Internet Explorer. I actually have that working over at the CrazyEgg overview page. I reinvented the wheel lightboxy thing with almost all CSS instead of javascript.
The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades!
There is virtually no area on the web where you have to support IE5 anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I can totally support IE5 if I absolutely have to. You just don’t have to do it anymore.
Internet Explorer 6 was released back in the dark ages. Who even uses Windows 2000 still? Let alone Windows 98. And for those few people that do, do you really care about them? It’s really much more worth your time to make your sites work perfectly in Safari and Opera. People who use Safari and Opera are more likely to be people with money.
Just look at the Market share for browsers. IE5 has 0.35% of the market. That’s well below Opera 9’s 0.65%. So, when thinking about supporting IE5, get right on that after you fully support Opera 9 and Safari. And it’s not like IE5’s market share is going up. Obviously you have to look at the browser share of your target market. Not all markets have the same browser share.
Now consider the fact that IE8 is going to come out eventually and you’ll be able to completely drop support for IE6 too! Ahh, that’ll be the day.