The Joy of not Supporting IE

The last couple of weekends I’ve been fiddling with a skunk-works project to improve one of the internal web apps at work. Since it’s an internal tool and the entire development team run on Linux I’ve had the luxury of completely ignoring IE support. Previously I’ve felt liberated when I could drop support for IE6 but web development is a whole new world when you’re prepared to drop IE altogether – even IE9 wouldn’t have some of the things I’ve been happily using.

From simple things that degrade ok like CSS columns, to using things like ‘display: table-cell’ without care or concern to finally discovering the work-in-progress flexible box model it’s made web development not just bearable but down-right fun. Of course, once you start heading down that path you quickly realise just how far behind Firefox is as well – Firefox 4 is barely keeping it in the game. The flexible box model for instance is quite buggy and required the occasional odd work-around for Firefox whereas in Webkit (Safari and Chrome) it works significantly better. Add in CSS3 transforms and animations and WebKit is a pretty clear leader in web rendering technology.

The last few years have certainly seen the resurgence of the browser wars with huge leaps forward being made in speed and usability as well as a swath of new web technologies and innovations being implemented and then documented in hindsight – it’s an exciting time. It’s interesting to see WebKit start to build the same kind of early lead that IE6 did when it was first introduced, and a dominating lead in the mobile space. If mobile is the future of computing, WebKit may have already won the second browser wars, and they look well-placed to win it on the desktop as well. With the collaboration on WebKit from Apple, Google, Nokia and many others though I hope we’ll be saved from the stagnation that followed the first browser wars.