Change of Perspective »
I've come to a conclusion today. I'm tired of programming for Internet Explorer. It's just too much of a pain. Look at my CSS. Scroll to the bottom - those subselects are to make things look right again in Mozilla-based browsers, because I had to intentionally break the primary method so that it looked okay in IE. So, starting today, I am no longer going to cater to Internet Explorer.
Right now, I'm looking at some sample pages in Firefox and the pages look great. The font rendering especially is awesome. Looking at the same identical code in IE - and simple code at that, as I'm just playing around - looks horrible. I'll try and post some screenshots when I get home.
I know that, even on my site, which gets a high percentage of Mozilla-based traffic, that's going to affect quite a lot of you, and for that I apologize. But the things I can do with Mozilla-based browsers way outpaces that which I can do with Internet Explorer, so I'm going to focus on the best bang for the buck. Sorry, Microsoft, that's not your browser. I will do what I can to not break IE, but you're going to see the best rendering from a Mozilla-based browser (specifically Firefox, but they all seem to work about the same). If that bothers you, you may want to consider switching. You may want to consider an aggregator so that it doesn't matter (Bloglines is nice).
As an aside, during the BlogOn conference on Friday, one of the panelists (someone from Microsoft, I think) asked how many people were using IE. I couldn't see the whole auditorium, but the slice that I could see had zero hands raised. That's not all Mozilla - lots of folks were using Macs (and thus Safari). But it's most definitely not IE.
If you're using IE, feel free to continue using it. But using a Mozilla-based browser (I'm partial to Firefox) will vastly improve your web experience. It's more secure, more quickly receives updates when insecurities are found, and renders pages both more faithfully and more quickly.
Update: This doesn't necessarily deserve it's own entry, and since it sorta fits, I'm going to add it here: I'd like to see what I can do to try and generate a little income out of the site. I don't think I want to add advertising, but I might toy with it in the future. So far, about the only thing you'll really notice is that I've moved the Amazon wish list link to the top and included a Paypal donation button there too. This movement was also the impetus for the rant on IE (the buttons look much nicer in Firefox). So in case you were having problems finding how you could help, now you know!
