I hate Internet Explorer with a passion. For a number of reasons.

First of all, it’s buggy. When building web pages, it’s best to periodically check that they are working OK in different browsers. In theory, they should all look the same- in practice, there are slight differences between the way different browsers render pages. Usually, these differences are small, but when they are significant enough to make an immediately noticable problem with the page, it is in Internet Explorer. More often than not, in my experience, it’s due to the hasLayout bug, or the broken box model of Internet Explorer- both well documented problems with the way IE renders pages that differs from the W3C specifications (and therefore, most other web browsers.)

But it’s not just technical problems that annoy me. From the way MS ‘acquired’ Internet Explorer in the first place, through to how it was developed and marketed all feed into my hatred.

The way IE was integrated into Windows XP, creating a massive security hole just to get around a previous antitrust agreement (that no more applications could be bundled with Windows, while new features were acceptable) so that they could head of Netscape’s competition annoys me. (It’s also become one of the central marketing points for Vista- “More security! Buy a whole new OS because of a mistake in the last one that we don’t want to fix!)

Combined with it’s enormous market share (aquired through shady practices), it’s lack of development and failure to support more modern features of CSS mean that it’s difficult for web designers and developers to justify working on and implementing these features. So it’s bad for the uptake of web standards and the development of the web.

Even the way Microsoft acquired it was horribly unethical- they negotiated a licence with Spyglass (who actually built it in the first place), giving them a percentage of sales, then proceeded to give it away for free- leaving Spyglass with no income from Microsoft, and making it impossible for them to sell the licence to anyone else.

The way they used it to drive Netscape out of business (because their vision for the future of the web- with online applications similar to Google’s docs and spreadsheets- threatened Microsoft’s core business) annoys me.

Once that happened, did Microsoft continue to develop and improve it? No- at least, not until the release of Vista, when the first update in 6 years was released. Version 7 included tabbed browsing, RSS feeds, and lots of other features that have been around in Firefox, Opera and other browsers for several years.

The fact that websites coded to work in IE will often fail to work as intended in browsers which follow web standards means that, due to the monopoly of the market since the collapse of Netscape, if you want to recommend a browser that will display as many websites as possible, you’re stuck with a proprietary browser, locked into a proprietary operating system. Deliberate marketing strategy, or coincidence?

The whole point of the World Wide Web is that information is freely available to be exchanged, regardless of the software or operating system of either the server or the browser. Microsoft have undermined that fundamental principle of what the Web is simply in order to protect the value of the Windows API.

Whether I’d feel the same way if IE happened to be the best browser on the market (leading as opposed to following)- I don’t know. But as a (semi-wannabe) web developer, Internet Explorer’s consistently poor implementation of CSS standards (mainly the broken box model and the hasLayout bug) have cost me hours of time trying to fix sites to work across browsers. For what must be a contender for the most used application in the world with over a decade of development time behind it from one of the biggest, most profitable corporations on the planet, that’s just rubbish.