The short: Internet Explorer (aka IE or Internet Exploder) doesn’t display web pages they way they’re designed to be, let alone work with any code that is relatively new, yet there are still people using old versions of it.
Ok, so basically the way browsers work is they look at the code of a website (the HTML and CSS, etc), interpret it, and then show you the webpage. The problem is they all interpret it differently. Newer browsers like FireFox, Safari, and Google Chrome are pretty much on par with each other. Plus they’re generally fast and secure.
Internet Explorer, however, has a pretty bad track record of keeping up with the latest technology. And by latest technology I mean not even really the latest at all. This stuff was in development years ago. It just doesn’t do a good job displaying web pages the way they were designed to look. It can do some pretty wacky things that have to be dealt with, taking extra time to make “fixes” for different versions of the browser.
The thing with Internet Explorer is that a lot of people using it haven’t updated it in years. A small percentage (about 10.9% worldwide – 2.7% in Canada and 2.3% in the US) still use IE6, which is a decade old. A handful of these are likely the Nova Scotia government. To be a little bit fair, these weren’t really issues back when these browsers were developed, so now there’s no real way to get to the people using them to get them up to date. And users of other browsers tend to be more likely to keep them up to date. But this is where we’re at. It’s pretty much agreed that IE6 is dead now that big players like Google and Facebook have ditched support for it, even Microsoft wishes everyone would move on. IE7 is on its way out too.
That’s the gist of it, anyway. Just say no to IE altogether. Friends don’t let friends browse with IE. You get the idea.
Pass it on: bit.ly/IEwhatupwiththat
