I stopped using IE long ago.  Microsoft’s browser is simply too emotionally unstable for my tastes.  A recent visit with Mom brought this topic back to the forefront of my mind.

As I sat at her PC completing some upgrades and maintenance, she asked me to look into some idiosyncrasies she was experiencing when using my site.  A minor comment bug that attacked her occasionally was actually a result of Earthlink’s Web Accelerator technology and is common among cache-based proxy systems.  I gave her a simple workaround and general guidelines on when to turn it on and off in order to resolve similar problems.

One issue she had not mentioned, however, was in the way IE displays my site.  Instead of rendering the sidebar on the right flush with the top of the content area (where the Random Thought is displayed or, when not on the front page, where the first post is displayed), IE prefers to push the sidebar content all the way down to the bottom, placing its top flush with the bottom of the content area.  This essentially wastes the entire sidebar area beside the content and starts the first menu below the last post.  Mom kindly explained she did think it was a terrible waste of space, but she assumed I had a reason for designing the site that way.  We both laughed when I explained it actually was not supposed to look like that.

While IE has many security issues, their proliferation has more to do with the browser’s expansive user base.  I am not negating Microsoft’s apparent disinterest in secure application programming.  It’s just easier to find a lot of holes in software that happens to be installed on the vast majority of PCs around the world.  Still, it poses an unnecessary security risk because it’s such a viable and available target for those looking for a way to break into your computer.

The browser is terrible at supporting standards.  Like the problem I described with my own site, Microsoft fails to render 100%-compliant XHTML and CSS despite it being validated as correct by the W3C (you know, the people who actually write the web standards to which we code).  If you click on the “valid xhtml” or “valid css” links at the bottom of the sidebar, you’ll see that my site is compliant with the standards, yet IE cannot interpret and render the page correctly.

Microsoft also fails to support the standards when it comes to photos.  When you insert an “img” tag into a page, it takes several modifier tags such as “alt” (for alternate text) and “title” (for the picture title).  The standards say that the alt text should be displayed if the photo cannot be loaded by the client, and the title text should be displayed when someone holds their mouse over the photo (title is also used by search engines to categorize and index photos).  IE ignores the title text and actually uses the alt text for both functions.

I could go on, of course, but my real point is to recommend that you not use IE.  I can certainly guarantee that using that browser will diminish your experience on sites like mine that are coded to web standards.  I can also guarantee that it opens your PC up to far more security vulnerabilities than Microsoft would care to admit.  It circumvents web standards and enforces Microsoft’s own idea of how the web should work, making a world wide platform their own proprietary system.  This inflicts a tremendous disservice upon those who maintain web pages as they are forced to either code to Microsoft’s whims or to the actual standards as outlined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  Considering the W3C writes the standards, I believe I’ll stick with them.

In the meantime, I recommend you get a real browser, preferably Firefox as it is the most stable and compliant browser on the market.  It’s also quite versatile, extensible, stable, and provides a far superior experience.

For those continuing to use IE, all I can say is that my site is perfectly and correctly coded.  Given that, ask yourself what might be causing it to display incorrectly in your browser.