It is a well known fact in Web Designer circles and even the web user community at large that Internet Explorer 6 (or rather its continued endemic use, especially by large corporations) is one of, if not the main, reason for the web being held back from reaching its full potential on the desktop. Its fair to say that IE6 has accounted for a truly vast amount of ‘wasted’ web designer hours spent figuring out its many quirks and bugs. This is well documented elsewhere, so I won’t go into detail here.

I thought that the latest Internet Explorer release, IE8, was a huge step in the right direction from Microsoft. And indeed it might be, at least in comparison to its predecessors. However, a quick experiment using the CSS3 Selectors Test on the css3.info site reveals that IE8 itself also leaves a lot to be desired in terms of compliance with the latest W3C standardisation efforts. Whilst no part of CSS3 has reached W3C recommendation status at the time of writing, there is considerable effort by most browser vendors to implement it and a fair amount of excitement amongst developers and designers about what it offers.

So, running the aforementioned tests using FireFox 3.6 on Windows tells me:

From the 43 selectors 43 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 578 out of 578 tests)

Using Google Chrome 4.0.249.89 again on Windows, I get:

From the 43 selectors 43 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 578 out of 578 tests)

Internet Explorer 8 gives me:

From the 43 selectors 22 have passed, 1 are buggy and 20 are unsupported (Passed 349 out of 578 tests)

Oh well.

Whilst this is hardly a complete or particularly scientific study,  it gives another reason why IE should be no one’s browser of choice. Microsoft push stuff to my PC all the time in the form of Windows updates, so why not use that mechanism to keep IE in tune with what other browsers are doing in terms standards compliance?

I’ve come to the conclusion that giving IE users a slightly degraded experience (i.e. the site might not look quite as good but is still fully functional) as and when required is the best approach to take. This is quite easy to achieve and might have the side effect of making IE users realise that its time they changed their browser.