403 - An arrogant initiative in defense of the web

I hate internet explorer, I hate it so much. At lest once a day I curse it to the pits of hell to be torched endlessly by a Richard Simmons kazoo band. My hate for internet explorer mainly comes from my own laziness, I just don’t want to spend the time to create the same website twice, once for internet explorer and again for everyone else. I don’t believe that we should have too, Microsoft should follow the standard set out by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A standard that all the other major browsers support.

Internet explore hurts the internet.

A while ago I had this idea, to create a javascript that you install on your website that created a DHTML pop up if you browse the site with internet explorer. The pop up would tell you about the advantages of using other browsers, the disadvantages of using IE, and links to download locations. At the bottom there would be a check box that disables the pop up for a single session. next time they come back the would get the same pop up until they change browsers.

But it looks like someone else beat me too it. http://403day.org/

I would love to install this script on all the websites that I have Dev accesses to but that wouldn’t be nice. So instead I have installed it on my two biggest websites. Funvill.com and Abluestar.com. Funvill.com still pulls in about 20k a month in unique visitors even thou I shut it down about a year ago and Abluestar.com last month got 675k unique visitors thanks to stumbleupon. Between Abluestar.com and Funvill.com 88% of visitors are using Firefox and 11% internet explore. So basically I am throwing away 76k unique visitors in hopes that some of them will upgrade to a new browser.

I HATE INTERNET EXPLORE

Below I have included some hate quotes about internet explore that I enjoyed.

This is why web developers need to stop working around shitty rendering engines en masse. Every single time we - as developers - utilize hacks to make things work in IE where they're fine in WebKit, Gecko, et. al., we further allow IE to be as bad as it is. Do you honestly think IE would be the POS it is today if the world's web sites didn't work in it? Every single time we work around it we provide Microsoft reason not to change anything. Literally. Microsoft's biggest concern has always been backwards compatibility, and it is that reason that so many of the issues we have now we also had then. It would be one thing if IE7 had shown considerable improvement in this regard, but that simply isn't the case. IE7 kept some bugs, and swapped out some well-known ones for others, which we now have to hack around, again. Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

MS doesn't want those fixed. Seriously, they make money by ensuring that other browsers can't compete because the Web is broken to conform to IE's modifications of the standards. In this way they lock people into their platform. If IE was standard compliant, then soon Web apps would be standard compliant, and then why the hell would big companies stick with IE and an expensive OS, when they can just run Linux for free? Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

IE will never have the same functionality, at least in terms of standards compliance, as other browsers as long as MS is allowed to bundle it without also bundling competitors. The Web will remain broken so long as MS is allowed to abuse their monopoly and numerous other markets will be broken as well, with innovation intentionally slowed for their profit. It is long past time the government enforced the fucking laws against MS, despite all the campaign contributions they made to both parties Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

If browsers actually required that we provide valid code each and every time, things would be a lot better. How many browser security holes can be traced to a parser that would not have been affected had it simply seen invalid input and rejected it? How much simpler and faster would browsers be if they didn't spend so much time trying to figure out what the person who wrote the code intended? How much more accessible would the content on those pages be to alternative browsers, like screenreaders? Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

We've been running for way too long on the mindset that anybody can build web pages. Web browsers were built with this mentality. If I'm integrating with an enterprise XML API, and I feed it bad data, it gives me the proverbial finger. Why should web pages be any different? If you want to put stuff online, learn how to do it properly. The web is a cesspool for precisely this reason, and you can't blame the standards themselves. The XHTML and CSS specs are by no means perfect, but writing well-formed XHTML and CSS is not difficult. Requiring developers to ensure that every start tag has an end tag, proper nested order, alt tags, and the like, would go a long way toward keeping the architecture of the Internet sustainable. Granted, it might put sites like Myspace out of business, but I'll go out on a limb and say that's not a bad thing. Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

"In yet another instance of up-and-coming browser developers fighting back against the Microsoft behemoth, the makers of Opera have filed a complaint with the European Union against Microsoft. In their complaint, they allege that IE's 77% market share abuses its dominant position by tying IE to Windows and its refusal to accept Web standards, causing significant interoperability issues. The complaint also requests that the EU's Antitrust Division force Microsoft to separate IE from Windows and accept several different standards, thereby resolving major interoperability issues and providing consumers more choice in the browser market." Source: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/14/192240