KenB - 6:05 pm on Jan 30, 2010 (gmt 0)

Is it any surprise that it worked, at least for the IT certified ignoramuses who mixed the "browser is the computer" kool-aid with the "IE is the browser" moonshine? Not only can they not move from IE, they can't even move from IE6. And yes, my employer fell for it.

My last employer before I struck it out on my own (some seven years ago) fell for the same trap. I was their webmaster and I had constant fights over this issue. They had drank so much of the MSFT cool aid that they could not see the trap that they were leading themselves down in regards to web development. I was constantly advocating standards compliance with their internal and external websites so that they wouldn't be beholden to MSIE, but they kept saying IE has 95% of the market so it didn't matter.

I went around and around with them over this issue. I knew that if they married themselves to MSIE too tightly (it was IE5.5 at the time) it would come back to haunt them. Eventually I quit of the issue. Making IE the corporate browser was one thing, but I truly felt that it was utter foolishness not to do the basic design/development stuff that would allow web applications to work on whatever browser was used.

The argument was always that it is more expensive to support multiple browsers, and I'd argue it isn't any harder to design to W3C specifications.

I wonder how much money ended up being wasted by all the companies out there that adopted the MSIE only philosophy only to then have to spend major money just to test and fix stuff when the next version of MSIE came out.

In the end the inability of companies to leave IE6 behind proves that it is much more cost effective to design to W3C specifications and use open technology as this pretty much future proofs a website/webapp against newer versions of browsers. It is also a smarter way to design from a security standpoint as it doesn't lock an organization to an outdated browser just because their webapps don't work on the newer stuff.