I’ve been so focused on bikes that I’ve been completely ignoring most of the nerd stuff that I pretend to like as a healthy distraction. For the most part, I even managed to stay blissfully ignorant of Facebook’s IPO, which–given the 11% drop the stock took today–was apparently the correct financial position to take.
What I couldn’t ignore, though, was the news today that Google’s Chrome browser had surpassed Internet Explorer and is now the number one browser in the world. Browser usage stats mean almost nothing to the majority of people in the world, but for anyone who’s done time as a web developer or designer–or worst of all, both–the end of IE’s long reign of terror has a significance that can’t really be explained with words.
But I’ll try: the whole world agreed to a standard for how the Internet should work, and then Microsoft did something completely different.
Some believe they were trying to claim the entire Internet by forcing everyone to live by their broken and poorly conceived standards, and others believe it was just dumb decisions and general incompetence, but either way, even Microsoft ended up sort of apologizing to the world with the countdown clock you see above.
So sure the victory’s muted a bit because even they ended up feeling bad about having made it, and the current versions of IE are apparently better (or so I’ve read), but there are things a man can be put through the he’s simply unable to forget, and Internet Explorer 6 is one of those things. In fact, for anyone who’s ever tried to make a web site work with all the various simultaneous incarnations of Internet Explorer, the only thing worse than IE6 was IE7, which took one tiny step toward working like every other browser out there, and then stopped. I didn’t really make the leap, leaving it stranded somewhere between IE6 and every other browser, which was so much worse than just having one jacked up rogue browser. Let me tell you what this meant in terms anyone can understand.
This meant the IT-something guy who wears the same Ramones t-shirt to work every casual Friday and doesn’t make eye contact when he talks–that guy you sort of laugh at behind his back because you’ve caught him talking to himself? Well, he had to write all these little exceptions just for IE6–and by that I mean like three-thousand or so lines of code–so that all the dumbasses still using IE6 would actually see something like your company’s web site and not an Atari Pong screen filled with random pieces of Times New Roman scattered around like body parts.
That time you caught him talking to himself? That was IE6. Or IE7. Or both.
I am not shitting you.
Say you built a really simple web site that displayed a few bits of navigation and a photo of Puscifer’s Maynard James Keenan exactly like this in all versions of Mozilla’s Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari on both Mac and PC, and even Opera:
This is how it would look in Internet Explorer 6:
Can you see the difference?
Well, once IE7 came along, you still had to deal with all the IE6 workarounds–shitty patched together CSS fixes and bits of crap conditional code–and once you got your pages to render the same in both IE6 and everything else, you’d check IE7 and everything would be shifted all the way to the right so that it was mostly off the screen.
It was like you woke up in hell one morning, and the dude in charge of running the belt sander on your skull was out sick, but his cousin was around with a nail gun, and then the next morning Belt Sander was back but Nail Gun had stuck around, too, and you were like What? That is literally and exactly how unfair it was. Exactly.
By the time IE8 came around, it was just like a small guy with a pair of pliers or something but you really weren’t paying attention anymore, and then IE9 was actually like someone with ice cream but by then you lacked the ability to relate to others at all so you just swung blindly at the ice cream and knocked it out of his hands and ran off, asking to have your skull sanded and nail gunned.
There was a big countdown party to the extinction of IE6 and stuff, but really, I’m a believer in the free market when it comes to that Darwinian stuff, and the only real cure is something entirely different. So Chrome’s rise to the top marks, for me, the real and actual end of our long, dark international nightmare, and probably the start of a much faster, richer and more secure international nightmare experience.
Yes, Microsoft’s IE6 experiment taught us all that nothing leads to progress like monopolies and the complete and utter breakdown of standards.
I told you I wasn’t writing about the bike industry today, so any parallels drawn would be completely without merit, by the way, and the fact that the post is even categorized “Bikes” makes no sense at all. That must be a mistake.
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