On Microsoft wasting everyone’s time (including their own)
Microsoft are constantly wasting my time. I am a Mac fanboy, this is no secret, but I am going to make no mention of Windows users here today.
Are you a web developer/designer? If so, then Microsoft waste your time, probably on a daily basis, too and it’s going to get worse. When I heard about IE8’s impending release, there was the same heart-sinking feeling as when IE7 was first installed on one of my VMs and I realised that not enough had changed. We were promised better standards compliance, and whilst that was delivered, it wasn’t even close to enough. After having installed IE8 beta 2, it’s just disappointing. IE8 devs still clearly can’t add up, as elements that are laid out perfectly in Firefox 3, Safari and Opera are falling all over the place in IE8.
Now, I don’t profess to being able to write my own web browser. If I could, that’s probably what I’d be doing. I don’t develop web browsers for the same reason I don’t fly spaceships or present kids TV - I can’t do those things. So why is it that Microsoft employ this team of people who clearly have little interest in making a web browser that actually works? My guess is that they don’t care about their users (surprised?) or they don’t care about the developers working on their platform (again, surprised?).
For this reason, from today I am not going to be indulging them or their inferior software for my personal projects. I won’t open or test my sites in Microsoft browsers, and subsequently I won’t make any attempt to fix anything for those browsers. Instead, what I will do is give IE users a one-time, tiny notice that I don’t support Microsoft and politely suggest they try an alternative browser. I will also offer a style-less, javascript-less version of everything I do for people whose experience is completely hampered by Microsoft’s inadequacy.
Hopefully, any developer who reads this will adopt the same mentality for their sites and in a perfect world, users will start seeing how little their experience is taken into account by the software giant. It’s all about numbers, baby!
Someone has to start the ball rolling, and why would users when the internet looks fine to them?!
Dan:
Quality rant there JT.
Spare a thought for those of us who are LOCKED into developing for IE6, because the fucking imbeciles who worked on the £1bn NHS I.T. project made all their software for that browser and that browser only.
Or, to put it another way,
Jasper Tandy:
during the day, I’m still very much locked into using it. Working for an agency, we have to support everything (except Opera!), which makes Javascript and CSS…interesting!
On another note, I saw your blog the other day, it’s all about football though, so I didn’t understand it!