Way back in time, early in the last decade, IE6 came into my life and for what seemed like an eternity brought me nothing but grief. Bugs crawled out of that thing like a break out at the insect house of London Zoo. The years and the Web itself rolled on and no updates were forth coming to the ailed and now ageing browser. Then the news came, like the Declaration of Independence freeing us from the tyranny of IE6 that a new IE would be coming. IE7 behold its wonder its majesty its slightly less obvious amount of bugs and its apparent shift to standards compliance and then IE8 with no fewer bugs than its predecessor.
I’m being flippant its not the bugs that bug me, its the stunning lack of support for even simple CSS that really kills me. :last-child? Not possible that’s pushing technology just that little to far for the worlds richest (maybe) tech company after all even Mozilla has only supported the tag for the better part of its entire existence. The excellent Quirksmode.org maintains a list of CSS selectors supported by different browsers the vast majority of which may as well be red for the entirety of IE’s entire range. We’ve added as little compatibility as we thought would make it look like we were working in the last 6 years, be thankful web designers. Its a practical joke surely? On the 20th anniversary of the browser we’ll be treated to the punch line.
I’m left still finding work around’s, pointless hacks and adding extra class statements to objects purely because IE, despite two major revisions, is still only approaching compatibility with CSS2; a standard that’s been around longer than most of the standards movement. I’m left longing for the days when, as with IE6, there wasn’t even the pretence of compatibility, it was a bitch and an albatross but one we knew and hated but at least we could deal with it.
Come back IE6 I miss you.
