I’d sat down to work on my university web project, and though I’d better just test the layout in IE. As I waited for Windows to boot I had a quick glance at my RSS feeds and came across nomoreiehacks.org (via Digg).
The idea is simple, but one I hadn’t ever really contemplated before: simple stop hacking.
37Signals produced a book called “Getting Real” (which you can and should read, free, online) - the book makes a really good point in saying that we should be deciding things for the users (for example, not allowing the user to choose how many results are displayed per page, but telling them it’s going to be 25) and this is something we developers don’t do enough.
Okay, we have two options. On one hand we can spend hours making up for Microsoft’s decision not to comply with current web standards, reaching a wider audience, and letting one company dictate how websites are built. Or we could stop that.
We could stick to W3C standards, and politely remind Internet Explorer users that any problems they might encounter are not down to our coding, but their browser’s lack of compliance, and that they should probably download and install Firefox. Which, by the way, can make you money thanks to Google’s Adsense scheme.
Before I get any “Professional web designers who have been working in the industry for ten years and would be sacked tomorrow if they stopped supporting a browser with an eighty-something percent share” - I understand the need for those customers, and I would never develop an e-commerce site that didn’t support 99.9% of browsers, and I know that all my lecturers mark with IE7 and a little bit of web activism isn’t worth the grades - but from now on, it’s up to the browsers to support my own sites.
Luckily, the majority of my sites work first time in IE, and 75% of It’s Samuel readers are using Firefox/Safari/Opera - which I’m sure is common across the majority of tech blogs - so I think that if a portion of the tech community take this approach then it could be a real boost for better browsers.
