Each year web designers around the world pull out a few more hairs trying to get their websites appearing correctly in Internet Explorer. Soon, you’ll be able to spot web designers from a crowd based on their degree of baldness.
When it comes to browsers, Microsoft seems to be the last to correctly adopt web standards. As a web designer you can create a website that looks fantastic in FireFox, Safari and Chrome but Internet Explorer turns our finely tuned layout into a mess.
What’s going on here? Browsers read HTML code and then draw what they read to the screen for you to view. If the browser has a low reading level then the resulting view of the website becomes distorted.
Back in the day, IE5 was without a doubt horribly inept at correctly interpreting a web page. Fortunately Microsoft has been refining their browser through the versions and each one gets better.
With IE8 available for download we see the first version of IE which correctly displays web pages as they were intended by the designer. Finally IE has caught up with FireFox, Safari and Chrome! All 4 browsers now display web pages similar to each other and this is music to a web designers ears. Now, a web page which appears in one browser is likely to look the same in another. IE is finally starting to play nice.
As of March 2009, the W3C reports the following market share for IE:
| IE6 | IE7 | IE8 |
| 17% | 24.9% | 1.4% |