Why Internet Explorer Hurts the Human Race

The internet is an interwoven part of our future. International commerce relies on the internet, our social structure is becoming dependant upon it, and control and denial of service is a vital part of strategic planning for military operations. Whether you like it or not the internet is here and very much a part of our lives.

But for the last 10 years the internet has been stiffled by the archaic rudimentals upon which it's mass success was built.

You see if the internet had been a stand alone package that people had to purchase to make use of then it would never have been sucessful, but because the internet came bundled with and worked on computers - and nobody in the last 20 years has been short sighted enough to think that computers wouldn't catch on - and is now bundled on palm computers and mobile phones pretty much as standard, it has become a huge success and a vital commodity.

The problem is that for the vast majority it came bundled in the guise of Internet Explorer. Now when a sane and rational programmer writes a network capable program that connects to the internet they build in either a launch patcher or an auto-update facility of some kind to keep the product up to date with the latest features and security fixes. This approach, particularly with regards security, is an essential element to online aware applications.

Internet Explorer never featured this vital element, and consequently there are still millions of computers out there with software that is 20 years old.

Microsoft's vision for the web was for web sites to all look like Windows, they wanted internet pages to feel like your desktop. They didn't want designers getting their hands on our screen space or think about what web browsing would be used for, they were just certain that the interent should look and feel like Windows. As a result they ignored every web standard the various standards committee's tried to introduce and did things their own way.

With each new version of Internet Explorer Microsoft gradually began to realise their mistake and implement crucial missing features from their product, but they've done so by bolting extra bits on and not by redressing the fundamental incompatability between Internet Explorer and the rest of the web browsers.

Usually, and most noteably in the jump from version 6 to 7, they did so in a not very compatible way.

As people using version 6 of Internet Explorer did not get an automatic update, web developers found themselves supporting not just IE6, but also IE7, and every other browser - often using unique code and hacks for each browser.

Now IE8 has a few incompatabilities with IE7, and because there are still so many IE6 users (5% of daytime browsing of ecommerce sites is still done on IE6) web developers are having to cope with multiple non-compatable versions of IE, in addition to supporting the web standard.

There are a few issues between different browsers such as Firefox and Chrome but they are largely compatable with each other. IE stands alone as needing dedicated support and development, for each of it's versions.

And because IE represents a large segment of the market it's impossible for other browsers to press ahead in implementing new technologies when the lack of a unified standard meens that anything really innovative wont catch on.

3D hardware being a key one, did you know that modern PC's aren't even capable of 2D graphics? They render 2D by creating a 3D surface and displaying the output as a texture upon it. The web is still unable to work in 3D, there's no vertice or polygon based command sets - let alone texturing, lighting, and the plethora of other innovations of the last 10-15 years.

Compared to all other areas of desktop computing the web is around a decade behind thanks entirely to Internet Explorer.

And there's still little indication that things will change any time soon.

Thanks to Microsoft and their Internet Explorer product the progress of the human race has been noteably impacted in a detrimental way.

We need to throw Internet Explorer away, but we cant force an update because there's no updating tool - and even if we did we could only update people to a newer version of IE - that would be something at least but that wouldn't solve the problem.

What we really need is for Microsoft to adopt a new browser in it's operating system, a modern one that uses web standards, and then we need people to get that new operating system.

The only way that's going to happen is if Microsoft give away free licences to home users.

If Microsoft could do that they'd be atoning for their past mistakes and retiring their antiquated piece of shit from the browser industry to let the people who are trying to move the human race forward get on with it.

Fat chance eh.

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