The Fall of Internet Explorer

For those of you who miss the cultural reference, this is a reference to “the Whore of Babylon,” a symbolic figure from the Apocalypse (the Book of Revelation). The woodcut above (minus the logos) is from the Luther Bible’s illustration of Revelation 17. The passage below is adapted from the fall of the whore of Babylon, from Revelation 19.

Fallen, fallen is Internet Explorer the great!
She has become a dwelling place for hackers,
a haunt for every malware,
a haunt for every unwelcome and unremovable toolbar.
For all PCs have drunk the wine of the passion of her internet monopoly,
and the CEOs of the valley have committed immorality with her,
and the merchants of intrusive toolbars have grown rich from the power of her integration with Windows.

Come out of her, my developers, lest you partake in her proprietary standards, lest you share in her loss of market share, for her bugs are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities.

It was recently reported that Microsoft will stop issuing security updates for Internet Explorer after January 12. If you’re still using Internet Explorer, please don’t.

While we’re at it, please ditch Outlook for email

In fact, don’t use Outlook for email, and persuade anyone you know who is using Outlook to stop using it. The sooner it dies, the better off we’ll all be. Outlook has singlehandedly held back the progress of HTML email for nearly a decade; the 2007–2013 version of Outlook uses Microsoft Word’s rendering engine, which does not support the height and display CSS properties, floats, positioning, nor even the CSS box model. Width and padding are not supported on divs and paragraph tags. For this reason, HTML emails are still mired in nested tables and bloated markup. Outlook is filled with bizarre bugs requiring conditional comments to insert wasteful markup, wasting bandwidth and making HTML email inaccessible, making life for us developers a pain.

You may ask yourself, “why would Microsoft switch from using the buggy IE HTML rendering engine to using the horrible Microsoft Word rendering engine in Outlook? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of!” Yes, indeed. A friend of mine put it this way:

When I worked at Microsoft around 2008 I was at a meeting about this very topic. The consensus was that this is what people wanted because the majority of people used Outlook and going to HTML rendering would break too many things downstream. Also they believed that email clients would acknowledge Microsoft’s dominance and make themselves compatible with Microsoft’s rendering engine. Oh, the hubris.

I, for one, think that every ounce of marketshare Microsoft lost to Google is deserved. Whereas Google has made the web and many related technologies a joy to use, developing and giving away amazing tools like Chrome Dev Tools and offering amazing services such as Google Drive for free, Microsoft tried to milk the web for money, and when left unchallenged, left the bug-infested and badly standards non-compliant Internet Explorer 6 to languish for years without an upgrade. The adoption of CSS was hindered for years due to a persistent but un-ignorably large segment of the market using Internet Explorer 6. Microsoft’s merging of Internet Explorer with Windows elevated browser level bugs to operating system level bugs, and gave rise to the existence of malware botnets. And all this while, as Steve Ballmer destroyed half of Microsoft’s market valuation, he was receiving compensation of around $40–45 million per year.

The sooner IE and Outlook get abandoned so the web and email can move forward, the better. Do your part. Persuade your parents and coworkers to quit using IE and Outlook. The web and email will be a better place when Microsoft’s disastrous legacy is gone.