Yesterday, while talking with a colleague, we referenced something I had written on unto.net. As he pulled it up on his screen, I noticed that all of the text was centered. (Shades of Suck, perhaps?) Naturally, he was using Windows XP and Internet Explorer.
Now clearly I haven't given a lot of attention to the layout of this site -- just a little CSS here and there -- but I had managed to at least look at it with a few different browsers. Such as Firefox, Safari, Opera, and even IE for Mac. So it never occurred to me that IE for Windows would render something so fundamentally different.
But sure enough, there it was. Every bit of text was centered on the screen. And probably has been for a year.
Fixing the problem was trivial -- but it does make you wonder why it needed to be fixed in the first place.
I'm curious to see what Microsoft does with the next version of IE. Now that there are a few popular standards-compliant web browsers out there, and now that people are using them, will Microsoft make the effort to rewrite core parts of IE and catch up with everyone else? To do so will break sites that were designed to work with quirks of older versions of IE.
But not to do so would be both appallingly arrogant and potentially capable of driving more users to Firefox.
Not that there is any reason to be using IE any more, anyway. In fact, just yesterday Bruce Schneier, one of the world's leading experts on computer security, wrote a list of recommendations on safe personal computing. As for browsing, he writes: "Don't use Microsoft Internet Explorer, period."
And as the layout bug on unto.net demonstrates, it is possible to be completely Windows-free (to the point you haven't even seen your own website in IE). Even for a person that uses a computer for the majority of his waking hours. Even for someone who makes his livelihood designing software. Even in an environment (like A9/Amazon) that occasionally uses Microsoft Word documents and Exchange for meeting scheduling. In fact, it isn't even hard.