chip cullen graphics freelancer

I’m not taking a radical approach with this cartoon - this is a very common point of view among web designers. It was just driven home this week with a website that I’m working on. It works fine in a bunch of more standards-compliant browsers, but you open it up in Microsoft Internet Explorer and *KABLOOEY!*. I’d estimate roughly 1/3 of a web designer’s time is spent trying to fix what IE breaks on websites.

What gets me, though, is that a huge corporation like that, arguably the largest software maker in the world (are they??), can’t make a browser that freakin’ works. The open source folks at Firefox could pull it off, Apple could pull it off (with Safari), even small Scandinavian company could make it happen (with Opera). But Microsoft? Oh no no no. And it’s not like web standards are anything new - standardized recommendations for rendering HTML has been around since 1999. It’s 8 years later. IE has had several updates - but Microsoft still can’t seem to pull their act together. Even the newest Internet Explorer - IE 7, still doesn’t get it right.

C’mon, people, get with the program!!

PS - don’t even get me started on IE 6.