The Curse Called IE
May 30, 2003, 10:05 amSo Microsoft has to pay AOL $750 million in settlement for the anti-trust crap. I mean, that's nice and all, but what concerns me is this (from news.com.com):
AOL also agreed to a seven-year royalty-free license of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.
I'm going to assume that AOL is going to continue to embed IE in their web client. Damnit! Earlier this year, they were discussing using Gecko, the rendering engine from Mozilla for their client. That would have meant that the millions of people that use AOL would be using a web browser that takes W3C standards seriously.
When I told Jason this, he said, “Well, at least now we don't have to support two browsers.”
But the thing is, we do have to support two browsers. Anyone that uses CSS for layout – specifically to recommend widths – has to use this horrible hack to provide a width for IE for Windows and the rest of the world.
AOL is using Mozilla's mail client for their newest mail client. All their new “features” are really mozilla features.
I guess it's not good to get ones hopes up that people will stop using IE anytime soon. The sucky thing is that Microsoft has no incentive to fix the problems in IE and most people don't care enough about having a better web experience (through tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, find-as-you-type search, etc.) to change.