Has IE broken your heart?

Has looking at a website in Internet Explorer made you want to give up trying to be a web developer? I don't understand how that garbled mess could have come from my page. It looks so awesome in Firefox.

IE (mostly 6.0) is no less than the bane of my web developing existence.

I've yet to find one developer that likes IE and how it makes HTML pages look.

The problem is that 95% of people out there don't know that, and don't care. So, we are stuck developing for something that just isn't right. Hopefully FireFox will take up a bit more market share and Microsoft might go back and have a nice good hard look at themselves. I doubt it, but we can live in hope.

With the success of FF3, I'm hoping that IE 8 will be a lot better in terms of web page rendering. It has broken my heart with some JavaScript that went wrong. I mostly test my sites in FF and I make them for FF so when I went into IE to test it I was shocked to see that everything was a jumbled mess of text, graphics, and visible code as text. Absolutely horrific.

Why don't you just test with IE first, and then adapt to FF?

Because IE is arguably the worst browser made by man =).

If you think about it, if IE would not exist, the future of web development would bring a surge to the community. Think about how we have to rewrite pages perfect in other browsers just for IE6/7. I've actually sent an email to them saying this. I almost wanted to quit about 10 years ago with an earlier version of IE. I basically cried when I saw a layout I had been working on for weeks, look in IE like a butchered cow at a slaughter house.

IE is allowed to be as umcompliant as it is because web developers continue to code for it. Instead of thinking it as "correct" browser behavior vs "incorrect" (in the mindframe of which you will surely go insane as you fail to comprehend the pervasive evil that is IE), but rather as "behavior A" vs "behavior B". It can drive you insane trying to program for both, but I'm sure it would drive you equally insane trying to design an engine that fits into a Toyota as well as a BMW. No one is imposing a cost on noncompliance (namely refusing to make sites viewable or usable in IE), so from Microsoft's perspective they have little reason to change. Their paradigm is coded for by developers, it is used by end users, how is that not a win?

Unfortunately for us, the costs of a grassroots refusal to support IE and to design sites as standards based and "tough luck if it doesn't run on your machine" is too costly (both in terms of lost work opportunity and in frustration created for end users by the changeover period of forcing IE into compliance) to consider as a workable alternative to the current soul crushing system. In summation: we're screwed.