Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 RC1

We loathe Internet Explorer here at Sizzle. Not only is it insecure (i.e. you're more likely to get spyware or viruses), slow, and non-customisable, but the browser also has a history of being non-compliant with web standards. This means when we build a website using nice, neat, and well-structured code, Internet Explorer often fails to render it correctly, despite us doing nothing wrong. This means we have to resort to complicated hacks and time-consuming workarounds to get sites displaying properly.

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, this wasn't too much of a problem. Websites were simple, uncomplicated affairs, and so displaying a site in a cross-compatible way was fairly easy. However, it's now 2009, and websites are often dynamic, graphical behemoths compared to their svelte, simple ancestors. Creating lean, adaptable code is the name of the game, and Internet Explorer's stubborn refusal to display such code correctly often significantly extends development time. And with almost 50% of web surfers using IE as a result of it being installed by default on every Windows PC, they're too big a crowd to ignore, much as we'd love to.

That's why we welcome today's 'Release Candidate' download of Internet Explorer 8. For the first time, Microsoft seem to have realised that progression is important, and that proper rendering of websites is essential to the development of the web as a globally-useful commodity, and so they've focused on standards compliance and proper rendering. While IE8 is still nowhere near as flexible as alternative browsers such as Firefox, Opera, or Chrome, it's an awful lot better than their previous editions.

We urge all of our clients, and every reader of this blog, to either update or switch browsers altogether. The more we can abandon the use of such antiquated browsers as IE7, 6 or the abysmal-but-somehow-still-in-use 5.5, the sooner the web can begin to evolve as it properly ought to!