IE7 coming…Inman asks a great question…
Shaun Inman asks an important question:
Have we really made a career of cleaning up Microsoft’s mess? Sigh.
Yes, Shaun, yes we have…
Firefox is simpy a better platform for development so most folks start there. Just the web developer toolbar alone is worth its weight in gold, but add to that firebug, color pickr (and a host of others) and you have a complete debugging environment for web design as well as tools to help on the scripting side. IE’s toolbar sucks and makes it crash more than usual — and what does it really do? Not much at all. Luckily, and I use this term loosely, IEs quirks are known entities and you can take most things into consideration when generating your layout — which really only ensures that you don’t paint yourself into a corner. Is it sad that the browser that most developers/designers hate to develop with (is ‘abhore’ too strong a word?) may yet be responsible for the extra job security and/or billable hours that keep them going? I’m sure the industry doesn’t intend for this to happen (that’s why we have standards), but the irony cannot be lost on us.
How many hours have you spent on fixing IE specific issues - or for that matter Safari, Opera and others if you support them?
Somehow I feel like IE7 will merely compound the problem. And that’s my optimistic point of of view on the impending release doom. But I will go on dutifully testing to ensure that my sites work well in all the big browsers. Honestly, the advent of Parallels on the Mac (where i can take advantage of multiple Windows VMs for testing IE 6 and IE7 - which I’m already doing) makes this much easier to digest.