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When I'm helping someone with a computer issue, I admit, I cringe when they open Internet Explorer to get on the web. It doesn't really matter what flavor they are using, although IE 6 has been known to send me into seizures. Anyone in the web design industry understands my I am talking about. Aside from its shortcomings in rendering a website, IE also doesn't match up to its competitors in a number of other areas including security and speed. Even if you’re not a web designer, IE is still short changing you.
PCWorld magazine published the results of a 5 browser benchmark test in its September 2010 issue. The browsers they tested are IE8, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5, Safari 5 and Opera 10.53. They compared these browsers over a number of metrics which can be summarized into four major areas: user interface, security, extensions and add-ons and speed. Rather than plagiarize PC World’s entire article, I’ll summarize the results.
User interface
Though subjective as it may be, Chrome took best interface with Opera and Safari trailing close behind.
Security
Chrome took the award for security as well. IE8 did make some great improvements, however, over previous versions. If you are using IE7 or (eek) IE6, upgrading, if only for security reasons, is highly recommended.
Extensions and Add-Ons
Browser add-ons allow users to fully customize the browser for maximum personal efficiency. Firefox has the most robust and reliable library of add-ons, but Chrome and Safari aren’t far behind. Microsoft has its Add-Ons Gallery for you to customize IE, but they fall far short of the extensiveness of FireFox’s library. Most appear to be proprietary as well, boasting sites like Bing, Yahoo and USAToday.
Speed
This has become a nominal point lately, as most browsers have become so fast that the server where the website lives is responsible for most loading delays. However, Chrome ran away with the Javascript handling results and also page loading.
In summary, Microsoft is still struggling to catch up to the rest of the world in browser development. Each of these categories affects the vast majority of internet surfers from casual to superuser. If you have ever spoken to a web designer, however, we host a special and often annoying hatred of this browser. This is due mainly to Microsoft’s ideas that, regardless of what the rest of the world is agreeing are standard features and functionality, they do it their own way.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) manages standards across the web. Without drowning in too much web jargon, all the major browsers (with the exception of Internet Explorer) agreed to render websites based on this set of standards. This means a web designer can create the code for a website and be confident that it will appear as it is designed on any web browser.
IE8 has come close to meeting these standards, but is not completely there yet.
IE7 doesn’t meet standards in a number of places and often forces designers to adapt a second set of code to make up for its lack of compliance.
IE6 was released in 2001. Some technologies that are commonplace in web design today, and even some that have crested their useful application and are on their way out are not supported by this browser. Web designers expect to have to create a separate set of code to accommodate these browsers.
In addition to lacking in web standards, IE is years behind the times in new technologies. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera all currently support some level of CSS 3 and HTML 5. These technologies will allow websites to push graphic interfaces to a whole new realm. IE8 doesn’t support any level of these, thus stranding web designers to play with these new toys in only their own development environments unless they want to create a completely separate website for IE users.
IE9, which is currently in public beta release, is said to offer nearly complete support of CSS3 and only partial support for HTML5. Microsoft is getting closer, but they still can’t compete with the combined efforts of the rest of the world. As much as we as designers and developers would love to see a version of IE that does support all these new technologies we are going crazy over, we would still prefer Microsoft to stop releasing new versions. That’s just one more browser we’ll have to test for and likely write special code to accommodate.
* For fun, open this website in two browsers, one being IE and the second being any other browser and see if you can find the differences.