If you continue to develop for browsers like IE11, you are the problemĮh, that's too narrow and overly activist-like. So we do play a part, but I think it's inaccurate to indicate equity the way "two to tango" implies. Had IE remained dominant, nobody would be talking about it taking two to tango.Įdit: as I reflect more on this it does occur to me that part of why IE lost dominance is in no small part because of developer preference for FF and Chrome.
INTERNET EXPLORER 11 END OF LIFE FREE
Only now are we considering taking some "big" step to free ourselves, as if it implies some kind of freedom on our parts to control the situation. MS is clearly the party at fault for the shit situation (commonly referred to as "IE hell") that we've faced as webdevs for years, because they had market dominance and simply didn't need to care about us, because we are developers and developers serve business interests and business interests has been to support IE. Should we have said no and been jobless? It's only now after IE is finally a tiny market share we can even *have* this conversation about tango or no tango. For years and years, IE was the dominant or at least a massive share, and developers *had* to support it if they wanted to keep their job. I don't think it really does take two to tango in this case.
If it's mandated by higher ups in your company it's your job to convince them otherwise or find a different job that's looking to future. If you continue to develop for browsers like IE11, you are the problem. I am personally convinced this has a bigger effect on my conversions. I put all that prospective development time back into making improvements to site functionality so that the experience is better for everyone else not stuck in the past. Any business that would have been possibly gained by supporting browsers like IE11 is a sunk cost fallacy at play. I stopped being afraid to expire things long ago. Despite being architects of their own pain and suffering, they'll point fingers at everyone else to assign blame. Yet they all buy in to this irrational fear that a handful of people acting in bad faith with steal all of their business. Deep down everyone knows that if enough people just stopped supporting a browser, people would be forced to find an alternative. Web development is this super strange industry of people shooting collectively shooting themselves in the foot. They had branding problems and NN6 was just not well received - thought I remember it being pretty good. Netscape was already dying / dead and no amount of money from AOL was going to be able to save it from itself at that point. Remember JavaScript Style sheets and how if you turned off JS you lost all of your styles? Yeah, that was great. MS got a lot of flack for trying to make up their own standards by force (among other things), but Netscape did similar things as well. U/DarleneWilhoit - I remember those days and I was a Netscape fan regardless. IE6 -> 7 was 5 years (2001-2006) and that's when Prototype.js and jQuery spawned into existence to solve the cross-browser puzzle and it's still something that persisted after IE7 and beyond for a few years because of Ballmer's tenure. IE didn't budge for 3+ years while Firefox was quickly making improvements with standards and performance. In 2003, when Phoenix / Firefox was introduced and started to gain ground quickly was when IE6 became the villain of web development.
INTERNET EXPLORER 11 END OF LIFE SOFTWARE
The monopolistic practices revolved around being unable to uninstall IE and the browser being a mandatory piece of software in Windows. The clusterfuck failure of Netscape (see below) is what allowed MS to really push the IE dominance and get into Mac, etc.
You're not wrong! However, IE 5 and 5.5 ( and even IE6) were pretty well received when initially released.