Standards Compatible Browsers

You may have noticed some fiddling about with the layout of this blog recently, without any new content appearing. The lack of new content is a by product of me being very busy at the moment, and the fiddling with the layout is by product of someone I know complaining that my blog didn't display properly in Internet Explorer.

Now to be perfectly honest, I don't think that anyone who would voluntarily use Internet Explorer would find much of interest in this blog. If you are trapped in a place where there is a mandatory standard operating environment which includes IE, then you have my deepest sympathies, but most people have a choice. Why anyone would choose IE, other than ignorance that there were alternatives, or just being too lazy to install something else, is incomprehensible to me. IE is a nasty piece of software. It is slow, it is insecure, and compared with the features offered in other browsers, it is roughly comparable to a Trabant.

I can't be bothered wasting any more time on this: I have worked out why my friend was having a problem (a combination of the defects in IE and a Windows security product) and I am not interested in messing with the layout of my blog to accommodate such foolishness. The foulness of IE is explained very clearly here, and I have nothing of significance to add. How to deal with the problem is explained by Stephen Fry here; there are other ways, but that will get you started. If you want to compare how different browsers render a web page, Browsershots is for you.

Seriously, the only thing IE is fit for is running Microsoft's vile "Windows Update". If you or your employer run a web site that is only tested for Internet Explorer, you might want to give some thought to the many people who use something else, and the business you may be losing if your site is not standards compliant.