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Why Do They Do It?

Entry 572, on 2007-07-13 at 14:58:24 (Rating 3, Computers)

Why do Microsoft have to make life so hard for us? As you will have noticed in this blog, I do criticise them with monotonous regularity anyway, but this tirade has been triggered by a particular issue.

I'm currently completing a fairly sophisticated web site (or maybe web database or even web application is a more accurate description) which uses a lot of Javascript to control client-side processes and requires fairly tight control through CSS. I initially got this working in Safari and to do this I just used standard manuals for the web technologies I use: PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and Javascript. In Safari the system works beautifully. It looks great, its fast, and it works every time. With a small amount of modification I got the system working in Firefox too.

But what about Internet Explorer? No, its not that easy. Microsoft have chosen to ignore or re-interpret various parts of Javascript and have added so many security settings that its hard to make anything beyond a basic web site work. This is IE 7, so its not like an older version they haven't had a chance to correct yet.

So I had to add extra code into my system: if the browser is IE do this instead of the standard Javascript I use for other browsers. Even then I still haven't got one function working because I get an error variously described as a bug in IE6 (surely they've fixed it in 7), a security feature, and a re-interpretation of the standard behaviour.

I can't believe that a company with the resources of Microsoft can't do a better job than this. An open source browser (Firefox) is considerably better, although there is at least one Javascript method it doesn't implement for no good reason, and Safari seems to follow all the standards remarkably well. Why can't Microsoft get it right?

There are two possibilities I can see. One, they are incompetent and/or just don't care; and two, they deliberately sabotage established standards through unfair use of their monopoly position. Of course, both of these are likely. Unfortunately, the majority of computer users are either apathetic or ignorant regarding browser choice so we are doomed to having to work with IE in the immediate future.

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