http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/04/02/browser-voting-results-month-1/
These results do not surprise me. While a lot of people involved with web standards have been on an anti-Microsoft crusade for a long time, and politicians and courts in Europe have their own agenda against big business, the truth is that for the average person, the whole kerfuffle is a non-issue.
I personally am pretty conscientious about developing with web standards. Not because the elite told me I should be, but for a number of very practical reasons:
- Coding well according to web standards both makes things simpler now and easier to alter or troubleshoot later.
- Deploying web standards means better accessibility for a significant handful of people.
- Given the steady trend to better web standards support across the board, it just makes sense as far as future-proofing.
But the truth is that, while people may justly complain about IE’s handling of the DOM, for most uses, IE8 deals just fine with good code, and I rarely need to throw more than a couple lines of code to IE6 in a separate stylesheet (by way of a conditional comment) to get it to behave.
As time goes on, if Microsoft continues to lag behind in CSS support (which in fact doesn’t look all that likely, if the prerelease versions of IE9 are any indication – they’re ahead of everyone else’s curve), one can code in a way to take advantage of more cutting-edge code while allowing more archaic browsers to degrade gracefully.
While that is more work, that is already virtually inevitable anyway. Why?
We web developers are geeks, and our line of work means that we cannot afford to allow our computers to get too far out of date. But there are plenty of normal human beings still out there who cannot afford the opposite: to keep their computers up to date. Try running Firefox 3.6 on (say) a ten year old computer. But real human beings are still using machines that old. If we don’t at least serve up web sites that are usable for them, in effect we are punishing them for being poor (or in some cases, just having a life that doesn’t revolve around the Internet), just as Microsoft was arguably punished for being rich.
That’s quite aside from the issue of whether web developers and standards zealots have the right to demand what browsers people use, or more particularly, don’t use.
That’s rather akin to Superlube saying they won’t service a certain kind of vehicle because it’s not sufficiently technologically advanced. To put it another way: It overlooks the fact that the user is the one who holds that choice. If he wants to drive a 1979 Pinto, that’s his prerogative, and you should be thankful that he comes to you for an oil change.