Internet Explorer 8: the unfaithful ex-girlfriend
// April 23rd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Fun, software, Writing
Sorry, but I'm with someone new, and it's better (photo by Michael Sarver)
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer IE 8 showing up now is like an unfaithful ex-partner showing up a long time after you’ve found someone better looking and less likely to break your heart.
Wrote this post after Amnesia Razorfish asked me to write about IE8, for Microsoft’s http://microsoft.com.au/ie8debate. You can find other opinion-leaders and read their leading opinions there (warning: many are not as funny as mine). I’m impressed Amnesia Razorfish and Microsoft were up for constructive criticism since IE8 is such an important product. Evidence Microsoft is learning to listen and ready to begin changing. You can contribute your opinion on http://microsoft.com.au/ie8debate or just twitter with the hashtag #ie8debate
There was a time (though it seems like centuries ago now) that Internet Explorer had me by the heart-strings. It was the mid-nineties, I was but a young stripling then, and all I could think about was the beauty and the power of the internet. I was a producer with a small internet business called Yahoo! that hoped to make some money selling ads on web pages when people went searching for stuff (as if!) and Internet Explorer was one of two browsers that most consumers used to access what many people still called “the world wide web.”
Back then Internet Explorer (IE) had a small but rapidly growing slice of the market and I was in love with her promise of fast times, with her sexy interface. (Can an interface be “sexy”? Can I get a “hell yeah” from the geeks in the audience?) In those days, compared to Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer was attractive; alluring, even. IE was great for me, great for Yahoo! and great for our customers. She made me look good, and she was going to help me make money — who can ask for more from a girlfriend?
Then the relationship began to go bad.
IE started to get carried away with the power she had over me. She wanted more money to keep Yahoo! search as an option for IE users searching the web. She wanted me to adopt new technologies like ActiveX that weren’t compatible with Navigator. By now, Navigator was just another browser I was just friends with, but that wasn’t enough for IE — she wanted me all to herself.
Then she started to hang around with a bad crowd, and developed a crack habit. Spyware and malware and all manner of nasty types started exploiting security vulnerabilities I hadn’t noticed when we first started dating. She had a problem, and although she kept releasing updates to address each vulnerability, there seemed to be a new crack in her armour almost every week.
At first I thought it was just a phase she’d grow out of. Slowly the crack habit began affecting the time we spent together — I’d have to download and install a big new patch before I began browsing the web, and it was costing me money and time in bandwidth (which was expensive and slow back then) just to maintain our relationship.
Even then, I probably would have stayed with her if it weren’t for two of her friends: MSN and Windows.
There’s a common observation in single guy relationship theory: the more beautiful the woman, the more likely she is to have a needy, unattractive best friend. The unattractive best friend (who my mate Tony calls “the bonus monster”) doesn’t like you, and will always be around just when you really want to be alone and romantic. She will undermine you, and if you’re not careful, she’ll manage to shut you out altogether.
IE’s bonus monster was MSN, this overweight, insecure, unattractive consumer web portal that kinda-sorta-wanted-to-be-AOL-and-Yahoo!-put-together. At first I didn’t believe MSN was a threat to my relationship with IE because nobody who knew how to change their default homepage really wanted to use it. But soon IE started to insist that we think of MSN’s feelings on every decision we were making; including MSN in everything we did together, even insisting I use MSN if I was going to do something online. Ick.
Then there was IE’s fat, clumsy and often aggressive big bully brother, Windows. At lot has changed since Windows got in trouble with the law and lost, but back then, Windows was a pretty scary guy to deal with. There was a tiny core at the centre of Windows — a brainstem that remained almost literally unchanged since the Jurassic equivalent of consumer computing evolution — and on top of that, all manner of computing services had been stacked, sometimes carefully, sometimes haphazardly. Sometimes the stack would fall over several times a day.
(Once I taught myself to juggle during a two week period of hell when Windows would crash my laptop hourly and then take 5-10 minutes to recover itself when I rebooted.)
Microsoft, IE’s dad, decided about mid-way through our relationship that it would be a good idea for IE to spend more time with Windows, and began insisting that they hang out together in what became an uncomfortable, unnatural way. It seemed like the more successful IE became, the more determined Microsoft became to make IE take care of her bully brother. Sometimes it was like Windows and IE were just one person; they started sharing a plate, started hugging a little too closely, began finishing each other’s sentences. It was wrong on so many levels. It was incest. And yet, when the courts finally sought to intervene, for a while Microsoft tried to say it was no longer possible for Windows to exist without IE. That was so weird it was embarrassing.
I’d been through a lot all this time, putting up with the constant downtimes, updates and workarounds I needed just to stay in this relationship, but I still had eyes only for IE. At least, until poor bloated, dependency-addled IE could no longer keep up with advances in HTML itself. And I bought an iPod.
See, for the past decade my employer had chosen the operating system I used at work, and while my shiny new iPod worked OK with my Windows laptop at work, I was blown away by the ease-of-use and clean simplicity of my iPod. I’d used Macs before in the past (I’d been a Mac evangelist and Editor of Australian Macworld magazine before there really was an Internet) and I began to wonder if perhaps the great times I was having with my iPod would be the same if I tried using Mac’s OS X instead of Windows.
When I left Yahoo! to go do my own thing, I bought a Mac. On my Mac there was IE, but not the IE 6.x I was used to, just something slow and clunky labelled IE 5.x. Not very much like the IE 5.x I’d used on Windows before. There was also Safari, another browser from Apple, which was basic and short on some features I’d miss a bit, but it was much faster than IE, and it was really stable.
There was also this new girl: Firefox. Somehow while I’d been focused on just getting by in my tumultuous relationship with IE, the un-sexy, clunky Navigator I’d known in the ’90s had dramatically changed. After a near-death experience and a long time in rehab she had gone into a kind of group therapy called Open Source and come out transformed. She was now everything I might want, and as my needs changed, the open source community ensured that she not only changed with my needs but often anticipated my needs before they changed. She was light, she was fast, she was flexible, and I could dress her up with themes to suit any occasion.
She was even OK that I was still good friends with Safari and wanted to stay that way. I’d found the girl of my dreams.
So a few years went by. Then just the other day, Firefox and Safari and were are at the coffee shop, working and talking via Twitter and Skype and Jabber with our friends, and you’d never guess who walked in. Internet Explorer 8. Looking cleaner, less seedy, and for a change, not joined at the hip to her scary brother Windows and her ugly best friend, MSN. I hardly recognised her.
So I asked Firefox and Safari if they’d excuse me, and I moved to another table to talk with IE 8 for a while. And every thing I learned just made me certain I’d made the right decision in leaving her.
She made it clear that she wanted me back, but I don’t think she even really knows what I want anymore. Yes, she has has some new features but I’m not overwhelmed by them, in fact, I’m not even whelmed. They’re very similar to stuff I already get with Firefox and Safari. Yes, IE 8 is now less befuddled with crud than before and more able to support the advanced scripting web services like to do these days, but that’s something I’d expect of any modern girl.
We went through a lot together, IE8 and I. I know it hurt both of us, not just me. But it takes a long time for those scars to heal. It takes a lot of upside for me to give her a second chance. I can’t see that upside in her right now.
And I’m a Mac guy now. Is there an IE8 for Mac guys? Ah, no. In fact, there isn’t even that terrible IE 5.x for Mac users anymore.
Sorry IE, but you’re the unfaithful ex-girfriend, and I’m in a better place now.
When I first started as a web producer, everybody I knew worked with only Netscape Navigator and IE in mind and they did it only from PCs. Now, in my consulting gig at Pollenizer.com Our team are nearly all Mac-based and we work mainly in Firefox and Safari (when we’re not testing for browser-compatibility). Times have changed for me. How have they changed for you?
