I just read through an interview with Blake Ross, one of the  co-creators of FireFox. I’m pretty much in the Microsoft camp of technology, warts and all, and often criticism leveled against MS from the anti-Microsoft side is just as much religious bullshit. However, when it comes to Internet Explorer and criticism leveled against it, I can easily side with the worst of it because IE really is IMHO of the more embarrassing moments of Microsoft product histories that is downright shameful and embodies all the people hate in Microsoft (take over the little guy by giving away the software, winning the field with actually decent innovation early on, and then once on top completely stop development nothing further to gain). That one basically says “we don’t give shit” to both end users and developers and that’s not something a company like Microsoft should be doing. Right.

Anyway in the interview Blake takes a more balanced view on IE (especially on IE 7) and I think it’s important to reflect on this attitude that Microsoft has had on IE for the longest time, especially for those of us that are generally pro-Microsoft and make our living with Microsoft technology.

There are a few interesting little bits in there but one thing that I thought really hit the nail on the head is this quote when he’s talking about Microsoft and the 5 year plus Internet Explorer hiatus that the IE team went on:

The truth is I think Microsoft is very directly responsible for spyware and adware and the pop-up ads in general that proliferated across the Web after they abandoned their product. I mean, this is the world's most-used software application ever ... and I just think it's irresponsible for a company to abandon it simply because they can't find a financial incentive to continue development on it.

And…

…how much can you really trust a company that five years ago completely left you abandoned? If they do, in fact, succeed in taking back some of the market share that Firefox has gotten back from them, who's to say that they're not going to disappear again? My issue is not so much at a product level, it's at a company level. How do you trust a company that left everyone out in the cold for five years?

I don't think that there was any particular malice in the hiatus, but a general attitude of neglect, which makes it no better given the implications that it ended up having later down the line.

Even if you discount the standard compliance issues that IE 6 and earlier has had (and still has in IE 7 although slightly better), the number of bugs and inconsistent behaviors in the web browser interface were well known since almost the beginning of the idle period in 2000. And nothing, absolutely nothing was done to fix those issues for all those years.

I think to point out the irresponsibility of that action – especially in light of the security leaks that the architecture brought out – is something that doesn’t get mentioned often enough. A lot of the security problems we have been and are facing can be directly traced back to Internet Explorer.

And yet, IE 7 is coming out soon, and it’s not really a serious effort at fixing this mess. Sure there are nice window dressing improvements like tabbed browsing, better Favorites management, RSS feed support etc. that’s nice and neat, but when it comes to standards compliance it still has a lot of issues that could have and should have been addressed. To make things worse some issues have been addressed while other have not which makes writing IE browser code even more difficult as you now end up checking for IE 6 and older and also for IE 7 better but not quite yet compliance.

But I’ll be honest, even despite the issues I’ve always used Internet Explorer as my primary browser and I still do. I also use FireFox for all testing and most of my primary development (start with FF then check and fix to work with IE), but also for some sites that have – surprisingly – problems with IE of which there seem to be more and more recently.

Right now I’m using IE 7 in Vista Beta 2 and it is quite buggy when it comes to browser rendering and I sure hope that Microsoft works out those issues (most of these are pretty major rendering so I suspect they’re known issues).

Some reasons that  I use IE is:

Convenience

Yes it’s easier to use IE in most situations – it’s the default browser after all. Visual Studio for one uses IE as the browser to let you automatically preview Web apps (you can also choose a different browser, but it’s an extra step each time you do).

Smoother Rendering

IE’s rendering engine looks much cleaner than any other browser that I’ve tried on Windows (and even the Mac). It’s very subtle, but if you compare pages in FireFox, Opera and IE I almost always walk away feeling that IE looks smoother more readable, more pleasing to the eye. I’m not sure if that’s something in the rendering engine itself, or whether it’s more subtle as part of the default CSS settings or interpretation of CSS values (such as em space and line spacing etc.).

Html Editing

I use a number of applications that do Html Editing on the Web and in desktop applications, and while FireFox recently supports some of the Html Editing APIs it’s support is pretty meager.

The Web Browser Control

IE is the only realistic option for Windows applications that want to embed a Web browser or Html editing into itself. There’s a lot of talk about why does IE have to be integrated into the Operating System – it just an application and I think THIS is the reason. Many, many Windows applications and especially Microsoft’s own use the Web Browser control and it would be a major disaster if that support was pulled. I don’t see a workable FireFox control (there’s one but it doesn’t work very well in anything but low level ActiveX containers).

I have many misgivings with IE, but yet the above are enough reasons that keep me teetered to IE in one way or another… <g>

Utimately, I think that it’s vital that Microsoft really fix the browser to be compliant. Whenever you hear the Microsoft story there's talk of 'limited resources' which I find really hard to believe given that IE is part of Windows and vast resource pool available with that product. If Microsoft really wanted to fix IE, it is certainly possible. So again, IE 7 is sort of like a lighter slap in the face (or maybe just a spit in the face). Other talk was focused around waiting for the next set of standards (CSS 3, XHTML 2 etc.) - well, we'll find out in 5 years, right <g>.

With the Web not letting up in the way that Microsoft probably hoped it would ( WCF? I don’t think so ), the need to build complex logic in the browser is only getting more intense and not just for the average developer but also for developers at Microsoft. Everybody suffers from this mess. None of the browsers are perfect on compliance and all seem to have their own interpretations of exactly what the standards mean. There really should be more done by the major vendors to come into common ground as far as compliance goes.

Wishful thinking I guess…