Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I just posted a story at ScriptTeaser about a weblog post whereby the writer rants and rails (not the Ruby kind) against IE7. I find myself in the rather unusual position of responding in defense of this much maligned browser.
For all that there are rants against IE and Microsoft’s use of non-standard technology, that non-standard technology gave us the roots of Ajax, as well as the basic architecture of today’s DOM (Document Object Model). I remember very well when IE was the hot browser, while Netscape’s Navigator pretty much sat there, doing little.
In addition, it was Mozilla/Firefox 2.0b that gave us JavaScript 1.7–a non-standard extension to the JavaScript programming language. So, the team behind IE is not the only browser team that ‘innovates’.
In fact, about the only browser that attempts to keep up with all the standards is Opera, and it only has about a 2% customer share.
You have to make pages that work, and they have to work in all of the popular browsers, and should work equally well with or without JavaScript (or Flash). If you can’t, someone else will. That’s the law of this jungle.