It’s not common for me to think about Internet Explorer (IE) and feel happy at the same time. For years it’s been a thorn in my side, as I know it has for web designers all around the globe, so I greeted the recent news that Microsoft was to end support for IE versions 8,9 and 10 with much excitement.
Microsoft will now only support IE 11, the most recent version of the browser. I haven’t used IE as my main browser since, I think, IE 5 when I adopted Firefox as my browser of choice.
As anyone involved in building websites will know older versions of IE have poor support for even some basic web standards. This means we’ve needed to create separate style sheets for different versions of IE to get them to render properly. Countless hours will have been spent/wasted hacking code because IE was such a crappy browser, thankfully this is no longer the case.
Microsoft will now focus on its new Edge browser which I still haven’t used, I’m sure it’s an improvement but I’m largely Mac based and will only probably use it when I need to test web designs.
Tuesday the 12th of January was a good day for web designers and developers the world over.
Sadly it came a couple of days after the death of David Bowie. He’s at number 5 on my Last.fm scrobble list which is testament to how much I appreciate his music. RIP David.