CODEWITHSUNDEEP
internet-explorer
Edward
Edward

Reputation: 23

Why is internet explorer so bad to develop for?

Why do almost all developers hate developing for Internet Explorer? Recently a client asked for IE 11 support on a new project, and one of the developers basically refused. My goal is to understand her point of view better. What additional development challenges does supporting IE create? Are there sacrifices to the user experience if we try to support IE 11? Or are there just a million little unpredictable problems that vary from project to project?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1248

Answers (1)

libertyernie
libertyernie

Reputation: 2684

Historically, Internet Explorer has been difficult to develop for, because it has often not supported features that were supported by other browsers in current use (i.e. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari).

In some cases, this was due to Microsoft simply not implementing a feature, but the problem was exacerbated by Internet Explorer's slow release schedule (it's only at version 11 after two decades, compared to Firefox and Chrome which are much younger) and the fact that users often didn't upgrade their version of IE, leaving them with an old web browser. Just a couple of years ago, about 8% of our users were accessing our site with Internet Explorer 8, which was released in 2009.

However, nowadays it is probably only necessary to support Internet Explorer 11 - in January, Microsoft stopped supporting anything older than that (except on Vista), and I think a lot of businesses upgraded because of that. IE 11, in my experience, has much better support for new features for than older versions (IE 8 in particular was a challenge).

Keep in mind, though, that Microsoft has stopped adding new features to Internet Explorer, so a few years from now, there may be new features developers want to use that are not (and will never be) available in IE.

Upvotes: 2

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