Michael Enger

I was perusing Hacker News when I came across not one, but two beautiful websites heralding the new generation of web content with a peculiar and somewhat surprising backer. Microsoft, or more specifically, the Internet Explorer team has decided to promote modern web standards by funding two projects, a browser-based version of the iOS/Android game Cut the Rope and a extension to CSS which supports OpenType typography features.

Made by designers for designers.

My initial response to the discovery that IE was behind these two projects was disbelief, followed by doubt, and then more disbelief. I grew into a web developer in the midst of a chaotic time for web browsers, where majority control over the masses of web-surfers was wrestled away from Internet Explorer 6 over the course of 6~7 harrowing years. I’ve spent countless hours tweaking and downgrading my designs, hacking at a wall of bugs and generally tearing my hair out to get things to work with IE6 and now Microsoft is trying to promote HTML5/CSS3 features as if they were never standing in their way to begin with.

I am aware that we have come a long way since IE6, but Internet Explorer’s story isn’t exactly the greatest example of forward motion in the history of application development. IE7 was released in 2006, five years after IE6, and at the time felt like a direct response to the introduction of Firefox, which came out of nowhere and exploded in popularity with its countless extensions and tabbed browsing. Since then, every new version of Internet Explorer has been promised as the “one they get right” in terms of following defined web standards and exploring new undiscovered territory, but it has come short every single time. IE is the best example I have seen of the narrow-mindedness of enterprise-focused software:

• Littered with proprietary features
• Focused on innovation-stifling backwards compatibility
• Long and obscured development cycles

I hope you’ll forgive my aggressive stance, but you must realize that I learned the basics of web development in an environment where everything I did in terms of following the guidelines for HTML and CSS was usually counteracted in some unholy and incomprehensible way by IE6. Later incarnations proudly proclaimed their superiority, but the few changes and lackluster support for internationally-accepted standards felt like a joke and, being the one shackled with the task of tearing apart my work in search of the one thing that IE misunderstood, I took it like a personal insult. Every new version of IE still required a conditional CSS stylesheet and at some point, just when IE9 came out, I stopped caring and decided that people still stuck with Internet Explorer would see a broken, ugly version of the website. The browser had gone from a nuisance, to a problem and was finally disregarded as nonexistent.

It's a good looking game.

My hyperbolic examples aside, I will argue that the mentality behind the decisions on where to take Microsoft’s flagship browser is counter-productive to the modern environment around development. Open source projects have gotten huge and aren’t going anywhere and people are getting very used to small, incremental updates and a transparent development cycle and it amazes me that it took Microsoft over 5 years to realize this.

That said, past my initial response of rolling my eyes and thinking that this was a shallow attempt to regain some ground with developers, I can’t help but think that this is a great thing. Both of the websites work damn well (in Opera and Firefox) and are examples of the web moving forward to provide more varied content. Also, Internet Explorer 10 is being developed with preview builds and updates from the development team and is getting a warm reception from the community. I am not changing my browser anytime soon, but maybe I’ll stop judging people as the enemy if they’re using the browser that came with their Windows system.

Edit: It has come to my attention that Microsoft are using slightly underhanded methods to promote their new browser. Maybe things aren’t that different after all.

Another edit: Microsoft seems to know how we feel (from Reddit).