The incompatible IE 8

I haven't been using Internet Explorer for a long time. I think I made the full time switch to Firefox back in 2006, when I left employment at a company whose website only worked on IE. That need to use I to check on the website was the only thing holding me back from using Firefox for everything and on leaving the company I made the switch without even thinking about it. I just stopped using IE all together.

Earlier today I was making some updates to my one-page website, which lists the different blogs I write and I decided to try it out on IE. Turns out that it looked terrible on IE 8 and only on IE. I tried it on Chrome, Firefox and Safari and they all showed exactly the same thing - what they were supposed to.

I had had some compatibility issues with IE7 and 6 in the past, but you'd expect that things would get better, not worse as time passes. Firefox got better and better. Safari has improved markedly and Chrome takes advantage of all the work that has already gone into WebKit to make Safari work well. That leaves IE on the outside.

The thing that bothers me the most is a simple question: Why does Microsoft sink money into creating a browser that is less compatible with all the others, than the previous version? It's not like it is doing anything else better than all the others.

I made a small change to the website, just so it would not look too bad on IE and in order to do that I sacrificed some of the design that appeared on the other browsers. Even so, the site in IE still looks different from what it looks like in all the other browsers I tested it on.

I've spent quite some time thinking about this today and I've come to the conclusion that Microsoft is more and more becoming a company whose products I don't care about. That seems very weird to me as I used to be a fervent defender of some Microsoft products such as Windows and Office. Both great products that Microsoft managed to break in their latest releases. They didn't just add new features or make some improvements. They changed the products and made them incompatible with hardware (in the case of Windows Vista) and with their own previous version (Office).

Looking into this compatibility issues in IE 8, I came across some discussions that suggested that even some Microsoft owned websites had some compatibility problems with version 8 of Internet Explorer. Weird, to say the least.

Looking at the sort of things Microsoft has been doing and at something like the Wave product that Google demoed yesterday, I get a feeling that the sun is really setting for Microsoft as a trend setting company.

A little bit more reflection brings me to the perception that as I work on my latest book, there isn't a single piece of Microsoft involved in the process. For the first time in the fourteen years I've been been a writer nothing I'm using comes from Microsoft and I hadn't even really noticed that.