Internet Exploiter: Holding the Web to Ransom
=============================================

Posted on Friday, 14th March 2014 by admin	

[rant] If you’re wondering where all of your development time has gone to, if you’re going prematurely grey, if your desk is dented from all of your head banging, if you’re at risk of going postal, or if you are panicking about global warming caused by all of extra computer time getting the job finished, then these may well be the symptoms of trying to get the damned thing working in M$IE1. [/rant]

There, that feels better.

So, what, exactly is the problem? It all began many years ago, when a certain company decided that it was finally time to increase their strangle hold and to try to take over this Internet thing. Given their huge resources, they were able released an inappropriately named browser and a portal which was aimed at convincing the uninitiated that this was how the Internet worked.

Inappropriately named? Well, especially at the time, the Internet is much more that the World Wide Web, so a browser might more aptly be named Web Explorer. The browser wasn’t bad: within a few versions it had some good features, supported CSS better than the opposition, and was reasonably stable. When Netscape dropped the ball with a confusing and buggy offering, M$IE was on the way to dominance.

The problem was that this was taken as a cue to sit back and claim ownership of the Internet. The browser was integrated into the operating system, bolted on a raft of proprietary features and was allowed to bask in its success. This ended the competition, the need to adhere to web standards, and the need to fix and improve a browser you were probably stuck with anyway.

From behind, a few other browser makers were trying to revive the competition. Most significantly, the Mozilla foundation, risen from the ashes of Netscape, were the first to seriously challenge IE with a browser which did a better job, was cross platform, and extensible. Furthermore, they were committed to open source and open standards, thus restoring the ownership of the Web to everybody.

Opera was already out there, but had an unfamiliar user interface, and charged for their product. In the end, it’s still there, and still actively developed, but only a hand full of users take it seriously.

Later, Apple developed their Safari browser, and Google forked that into Chrome. And there’s one thing that they all have in common: they’re all better than IE. Microsoft, it appears, had fallen asleep at the wheel, and let the opposition fly past it.

Today we have four types of browsers: all the good ones, all the old versions of IE, the newer versions of IE, and the weird ones that you might find lying around or embedded in other applications. Ignoring the last category, as indeed we might, here is a run down of your options:

Modern Standards-compliant browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and a few others.

IE 10+: Not too bad, but falls behind the others.

IE 9: The first of their new generation browsers – some support for HTML5 & CSS3.

IE 8: The last of the old generation browsers – no real support for HTML5 or CSS3, but some modern CSS & JavaScript features are available.

IE 7 & 6: All officially outdated, and should be abandoned. Even Microsoft is trying to convince everyone to drop IE 6!

Now here’s the problem:

Microsoft have not implemented a newer version of IE on Windows XP. The latest version is IE 8. That means that HTML5 & CSS3 are unavailable on Windows XP if you feel the need to use IE. Officially, MS tell us that it’s because newer versions of IE require features not available in XP. The fact that every other browser developer has managed to make it all work on XP suggests either that Microsoft’s developers aren’t so clever, or that there may be another reason, but that may be unkind.

Remember that