Why Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 is the worst thing that could happen to us.

I just wrote a comment that Microsoft is long overdue to stop mocking web developers and go to the Gecko engine. Many apparently thought it was an inappropriate joke; Nevertheless, this is not a joke at all, but a statement of fact. Those who disagree with this, apparently did not even try to develop for this wonderful browser.

Let me tell you what a wonderful process this is.
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How many browsers do you support, dear developers? Not so long ago, five years ago, this list was quite simple: IE6, IE7, Opera, Firefox, Chrome. Five browsers, plus some minor variations between Firefox 2 and 3 and Opera 9 and 10.

How many browsers do we support now?

Firefox, Chrome and Opera have not gone away. Firefox and Chrome long ago switched to a short release cycle, the latest manual upgrade artifact (Firefox 3.6) was recently lost to the instruments not so long ago. Opera should switch to the same cycle in the near future - and the latest versions of Opera / Presto did not add much headache. A Yandex Browser was added, which is inside the same Chromium, although it is updated less frequently.

And finally, to the question about IE: how many versions of IE do we have to support? In October, according to li.ru, the share of different versions of Internet Explorer in RuNet was as follows: IE10 - 4%, IE8 - 2.3%, IE9 - 1.7%, IE7 - 0.7% plus invisible on IE11 devices, which with the release of Windows 8.1 should discourage IE10 some share. Those. It seems to us that this is one or two versions of the browser if you are ready to donate 4.7% of the audience, or three or five - if you are not ready or suddenly you are writing a product for a country with a higher proportion of IE.

No matter how wrong! Listen carefully.

Internet Explorer, starting with, forgive, my God, the eighth version comes with a set of engines from previous versions. IE8 can work in IE7 mode and in Quirks Mode (in fact, IE5.5!). IE9 can work in modes 9, 8, 7 and Quirks. IE10 can work in 10, 9, 8, 7 and Quirks modes. IE11 can work in modes 11, 10, 9, 8, 7 and Quirks. And this, attention, different engines! I don’t know what they did when they made this decision, but the IE10 mode in IE11 isn’t IE10 at all! For example, in IE9-10 there is a bug with incorrect positioning of the canvas on the z-index , which was decided by setting it background-color: rgba (255, 255, 255, 0). In IE11, in IE10 mode, this bug was carefully ported by excellent developers from Redmond, but the workaround port was forgotten, and now the canvas with absolute positioning can not be used as BE. Totally.

So, if you, by chance, write any library or just want to reuse the code on different domains, then right now you need to support (how many?) TWENTY different versions of Internet Explorer! Twenty versions of a browser that uses less than 10% of the audience! For a second, firefox has had 28 major releases for all its existence, Chrome - 32.



And this is just the beginning, guys. The spirit of the old school is incredibly strong in Redmond: all these versions of Internet Explorer will be supported by Microsoft (how many?) 10 years! Interesting puzzle on an oral account: calculate how many versions of IE we will have to maintain in 5 years.

Paul Irish wrote an excellent article about this as early as 2011: www.paulirish.com/2011/browser-market-pollution-iex-is-the-new-ie6 . But even he was not able to predict the complete development of Microsoft developers.

Shaw ?! That's not all?!

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