Valhalla Island

It was a pretty big deal when 37 Signals announced their drop of support for IE 6 across all their products. Then Apple released the new set of MobileMe web applications with no support for IE 6. Dan Benjamin and John Gruber spent some time talking about supporting Internet Explorer in the latest episode of The Talk Show. I haven’t even bothered looking at anything I’ve made for the web (anything where I’ve been the boss) over the last two or three years in any version of Internet Explorer.

Beside the fact websites don’t need to look the same in every browser, my basic argument for never supporting Internet Explorer is this:

People that use Internet Explorer don’t care about their online experience.

Internet Explorer simply can’t render many advanced presentation rules and the stuff it does “understand” it often gets wrong. Making Internet Explorer display elements how you intend (that is, making it display elements the same way they’re already being displayed in Firefox or Safari) almost always takes a long time and is a frustrating experience.

I’m not saying go out of your way to destroy the look of your pages in IE, just develop your sites using the latest standards, IE will display it how it will (wrongly). IE users, because they’re using IE, are accustomed to imperfections.

There’s no problem easier to solve as a user than the problem of the website your visiting in IE not displaying or working correctly. Download Firefox or Safari, they’re both completely free, they’ll both import everything from IE and they’ll improve your web browsing experience across the board. It’s like driving a 1960 VW Beetle that breaks down all the time while being offered a 2008 BMW 3 series for free.

I have no respect for and refuse to support the guy who continues to drive the Beetle and complain about it.

I think the idea was brought up on Core Intuition (it’s hard to tell with no text transcripts) and then continued in the latest Talk Show. The idea that developers create client-side applications for Windows exclusively and further, for the Mac exclusively, either way you’re excluding a huge chuck of computer users by design. Why should web applications have to support every browser? Why not develop web applications that fully exploit the most capable browsers and then require those browsers for it’s use?

Mac apps require an expensive Macintosh computer. Windows apps require an expensive PC and copy of Windows. Download and install of a free, better web browser is much less to ask.