Hello, I’m not sure if I should ask this here, but I’m seeing a lot of resources that I’m learning to use that don’t fully support IE or don’t support at all.
I don’t know if this happens also with other languages, not only in Javascript.
So my question basically is why? Is IE hard to implement? What’s the real reason of this?
Thanks!
It’s not that other languages don’t like IE. It’s because IE doesn’t support modern Javascript. Other languages in general normally should work within IE. Just not Javascript. That’s why people try to stray from IE because people want to support browsers that can fully run all Javascript.
Here’s some info on the browser wars where they would try to be different to lock people in, then realized that working together was the better approach.
IE is waging a new browser war with Edge, and don’t seem to be doing that well with it either.
Microsoft browsers, in general, are the last adoptees of any standard written.
In many cases, they refuse to adopt period.
While one can appreciate that the giants of the industry may sometimes be slow to stir from their slumber, Microsoft have made it an artform to introduce their own, not-quite-the-same-but-close forms of implementation to things over the years.
Agree, except in only one thing back when IE was the de facto standard browser: One of the efforts to make other browsers look bad and hard to be compatible with was to make its own box-sizing model, in opposition to the w3c box-sizing all other browser followed.
That trick failed, now we all use their box-sizing model, now known as border-box. 
That’s interesting. Wasn’t border-box in Opera 9.5, released a year earlier and superceded by Opera 10 even before IE released theirs?
Because Micro$oft decided that they were the standards-setting organization, not W3, and they were adamant that they were going to be setting the rules. The other browsers decided that they were going to fall in lock-step with W3 standards (for the most part), and they just plain worked better than IE.
Then Micro$oft decided that they should probably try to work with W3 standards, and very gradually started working closer to DOM compliance with new iterations (ie, IE9 was more DOM compliant than IE8, but not completely; IE10 was more DOM compliant than IE9, but not completely; etc.) Then Micro$oft produced Edge just to get away from the horrible reputation that IE received from not being totally DOM compliant.
In any case, developers almost always had to write hack-ish code in order to get their work to display and work properly in both IE and other DOM compliant browsers. So, yeah… IE sucks. And Edge isn’t much better.
Just my two cents.
V/r,
^ _ ^
Is it not? As far as I can tell it’s way better and implements not only the current standards but even experimental features such as service workers. IYAM the real problem is that IE 11 is still going to be around until 2025, so we’ll have to fall back to syntax transpilers etc. for yet another couple of years…
Edge doesn’t support the summary/detail tag duo.
Well, at the rate that IE has lost market share I’m hoping that it won’t be that long until IE disappears and is used just for downloading FF or Chrome.
V/r,
^ _ ^
If you look at this a completely different way IE is liked by developers as it keeps us in a job. Imagine if all browsers worked exactly the same way. You write one lot of code and it works across the board. Brilliant except you can’t now say you’ve spent time making the site cross browser compatible where someone else might not have. I know its a weird way of looking at it but how many times have you explained to or shown a client the differences and how you made it work.
If they can just keep it difficult enough for the masses not to know how to fix it but easy enough for me to work it out that would be perfect 
That reminds me of the dark age, when staff were learning useful tricks and commands, not easy to find documented, at MS courses.
They seldom shared knowledge trying to keep the upper hand, and their lingo showed they were all locked in to MS products.
I think there’s still too much of that thinking, causing an overall slower progress.
OT)
The only thing I miss from IE compared to other graphic browsers is the “d” shortcut for scrolling half the page, IE5.5 was the last with that feature.
ha it was a little tongue in cheek, with a only a little sprinkling of truth. I do wonder though how long before web builder sites like wix etc make a lot of us obsolete. Sure for bigger applications you might need a backend dev to link everything together but for the average business website they are getting so good with thousands of templates for a fraction of the cost of hiring someone and without a lot of these headaches. but i am getting off topic.
Interestingly i did have to suffer Edge the other day. I copied a website (with permission) to discover that it played nicely on all browsers except Edge where the background video didn’t want to fit the viewport and had a bit of background image poking out from underneith. So i had to compromise and leave a black border both sides and hide the background image. Could well have been the original builders code but it was working on the other browsers.
Mind you the other browsers aren’t perfect in use. Firefox likes to eat all my resources if i leave it on for extended periods of time. Chrome is ok i guess but somehow doesn’t seem as useful as firefox.
What i’d really like is a standard for checkboxes and scrollbars as styling them is not easy or possible in some cases.
And sort of to piggyback my previous thoughts into a better worded form:
Developers/Programmers like uniformity, and interoperability. Mainly cause we’re lazy. In general, when developing code for browsers, the paradigm is “This code works for IE. This code works for everyone else.”
Microsoft relies on conventional wisdom, Internet Explorer took ages to step up. The new version is a lot better but the older ones had Developers crying all around the world. Hence, all those memes. Developers hated how IE made it so difficult to write a cross-platform code making them debug the same program over and over again just to make it compatible with IE.
And since, developers have this hate-at-first-sight relationship with everything Microsoft and Internet Explorer.
I think that’s simplifying the situation. IMHO the aversion isn’t about IE per se, it’s more about one part screwing up all kinds of tech standards for their own benefit only.
Not to mention the whole Microsoft attitude towards “we will make the rules and you will follow” bs.
There’s a joke:
Q: How many Microsoft execs does it take to change a light bulb?
A: They just light a candle and declare it the standard.
I have a modem in my PC XT 8086 that was manufactured by Microsoft. 14,000 baud. They started making it before the standards committee declared the standard, and were absolutely SURE that it would be 14,000. Then the standards committee declared 14,400 as the true standard. D’OH!
So, yeah… there’s that, too.
V/r,
^ _ ^
Bad luck for you. 
Bad luck for me:
In Windows95 I used a A4Tech mouse that used some advanced functions in the OS for 2D scrolling and with very useful custom shortcuts in a 3rd button menu. Perfect for my needs.
1996 Microsoft launched their new IntelliMouse featuring a scroll wheel and announced they would now also be a hardware company with more desktop products.
Then come a major os update. The A4tech mouse lost most of its features and the circuits soon wore out electrically. The same on other Windows machines I had and later on I learned the OS had changed how it responded to the more advanced mouses, timely breaking unaware competitor’s products.
I admit favoring IE during the browser war.
The then stale IE became like an icing on top of a status quo. 
Oh, it still worked. AFAIK, it still does (I haven’t touched it in over a decade, but used it for IRC when we got our first internet connection.) It still connected, back in the day, and no noticeable lag; it just slowed the connection down to 14k on the modem I was connecting to. No biggie.
V/r,
^ _ ^
Cause MS & IE tried to hijack the standards, and didn’t succeed, so they ended up the non-compliant black sheep that required special attention
