

Ask HN: Will Internet Explorer borwser ever get insignificant to world? - digamber_kamat

As a web developer my life has turned into a misery when I need to write separate for for IE6 IE7 and IE8. The so called higher versions doesnt seem to be backward compatible.<p>Adherence to w3c standards is in disarray which makes it difficult to run firefox targeted code on IE.<p>To add to all these problems the IE developer toolbar sucks a big time (literaly). I can imagine the hours I have wasted figuring out where is the error in my javascript with IE.<p>PNG transparency is missing in IE6.<p>Despite of all these problems IE is said to rule the market. how ?<p>What does statistics suggest ? Will it ever get so insignificant that clients would stop demanding compatibility with IE? 
Is that going to come in my lifetime?
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ScottWhigham
I have four seperate CSS files for our site - one for everyone and one each
for IE6, IE7, and IE8. The IE6 file is huge compared to IE7 and IE8 so that's
the one I care about. I save my graphics as GIFs so that I can avoid the IE6
PNG transparency issue but IE7 and IE8 render those fine.

So for me I care about "When will IE6 die?" I figure that I'll be able to
completely get rid of it in about two years. Will IE ever go away? No - that's
just silly. They have a 3/4 market share so why would MSFT want that to go
away?

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thristian
Mozilla's Asa Dotzler recently posted an interesting bit about Internet
Explorer's market share:

[http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/mileston...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/milestone_weeke.html)

IE will always be significant while Microsoft and Windows remain significant,
but the news isn't all bad - IE7 is more standards-compliant than IE6 was, and
IE8 is even more standards-compliant again, so it'll be much easier to make
site designs that don't turn to crap in IE as time goes on. If Windows 7 gains
any significant traction, putting IE8 onto people's desktops and removing the
IE6 option, things will get better even faster.

Look on the bright side; things could be worse - you _could_ have to make
pages work in IE 5.5 as well.

