I agree with you, but why can't this be used as an excuse to kill internet explorer?
It seems that IE has been a consistent impediment to web based technologies for upwards of 10 years now. There have been so many other things that have been horribly crippled because 'internet explorer doesn't support it'.
People are becoming more and more savvy from the standpoint of computer use, and putting up a redirect to install a new web browser... like Chrome or Firefox... is something the majority of people should be able to handle/understand.
I'm tired of waiting 10 years to actually use the technology that we have /today/.
Indeed. IE pushed many of the technologies that make today's stuff possible. Divs, usable Document Object Models, vector graphics, and XmlHttpRequest, to name a few.
I'd go so far as to say that it was 2008 before something genuinely better came along in the form of Chrome. Firefox did a good job of getting Microsoft to release IE7, but it was never compellingly better in the way that Chrome is.
I think this is a point that a lot of people miss, everyone is quick to blame those big corporate it teams that wont upgrade browsers that its their fault.
people dont upgrade unless they have a reason to, not because there is a better rendering engine or more plugins, by pulling your hair out and slowing yourself down to work on support for ie, you are also giving users a reason to not upgrade.
but (IT wont let you install firefox because x only works on ie6) works both ways, if the rest of the web shoots forward with these new technologies, companies will catch up.
Historically, Microsoft has put forth their own standards well before anybody else, only to see the official "Standard" be written differently by a 3rd party.
DOM, CSS, Box Model, Events, SVG, and a bunch of other things they did before anybody else (in a straightforward and reverse-engineerable way) were ignored by later groups who put together slightly incompatible "standards", some of which had no reference implementation. NN6, for example, was out for a full year before it implemented the W3C Events model that the Netscape team had proposed (which of course didn't exactly match the reference implementation that IE5 had in place 2 years earlier).
It's only recently that the Standards folks have managed to spec out things that the IE group hadn't done yet.
It seems that IE has been a consistent impediment to web based technologies for upwards of 10 years now. There have been so many other things that have been horribly crippled because 'internet explorer doesn't support it'.
People are becoming more and more savvy from the standpoint of computer use, and putting up a redirect to install a new web browser... like Chrome or Firefox... is something the majority of people should be able to handle/understand.
I'm tired of waiting 10 years to actually use the technology that we have /today/.