Internet Explorer: A Story for Reflection
1. True Love
A lot of web developers should know the following scenario:
Especially in the past, when Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8 were current releases, all these weird peculiarities of Microsoft's browser drove many developers to insanity. You had to implement workarounds and different kind of fallbacks, so your application was ready for Internet Explorer. Fortunately, frameworks like jQuery and various CSS/HTML-Templates defused this situation, because they handled nearly all platform characteristics. Despite everything, it was a time, when Internet Explorer was getting pretty discredited. Look at this:
See more on Know Your Meme.
2. Microsoft answer
Honestly, I have to say that Microsoft has done a much better job with the current releases of Internet Explorer. IE9 and IE10 support a lot of important features of CSS3/HTML5 and offer an improved HTML-rendering-engine.
That's all very well, but what happens, when you compare IE10 with Chrome or Firefox?
3. Some Empirical Values
In my company, we are currently using Windows 7 with IE9 as standard browser. Besides, Mozilla Firefox ESR is installed on each workstation as a fallback platform (so if there is an incident with IE or a security issue). Because we are primarily developing web applications, the browser is crucial factor for good user experience. Therefore, several development-teams started together a little study.
Some customers should work with a combination of Google Chrome and IE 10 for two month and report the user experience on each platform. The result was very interesting: Nearly nine of ten users said, working with Chrome is faster and more user-friendly than IE10.
Now there are some thoughts to establish Chrome as standard browser. The problem is, that approximately 5% of our applications would not run on Chrome, because they use specific functions of older Internet Explorers (chiefly .NET applications) . Furthermore we have some legacy ITS-Applications, which create error-messages, when you call them with something else than IE.
So the goal is: Refactoring! Next year, we are going to redevelop all ITS-applications with a newer technology stack (SAPUI5/Gateway) and totally platform independent. The same holds true for BI-Solutions, where we will use BO Design Studio prospective. A nice side-effect of this project is, that we would be able to use Chrome as a primary browser for all SAP-Solutions.
4. My Message for you
- Refactoring! Refactoring! Refactoring!
- Force good user experience. A smart browser choice is an important part of it.
- Always use latest browser versions. Especially when you want to work with new stuff like HTML5.
Thanks for reading!