IE-unfriendly

This post will delve into a few subjects I don’t like to deal with. Web design, for one, and software-based zealotry. I don’t think I’ve taken a side in the PC-Mac platform war since I was too young to know better (about, I expect, the same age as many of the current frontliners in the same battle).

Still, though, it needs to be said. Internet Explorer sucks.

It causes untold (okay, actually pretty often told) problems for web designers. It won’t display transparent PNGs. It chokes on standard CSS 2.0. It can’t display this very site’s dotted link underlines. Hell, if you’re using IE, you can’t see this line blink. That alone should warrant a browser switch.

Anyway, Ann Arbor’s own Hyalineskies has an idea to shift users away from Internet Explorer by repeated conditioning. See, if you’re an IE user, you’re used to the annoying error bars that appear at the top of your browser window approximately every thirty seconds (you’ve probably even encountered one on this very site!). Typically, these aren’t the fault of shoddy web designers, but rather represent Microsoft’s stopgap “solution” to its browser’s numerous security holes: generate an error every time the user uses any web technology, regardless of its legitimacy, that could conceivably be used to exploit an unpatched IE vulnerability! Makes sense to them, I guess.

Anyway, Eston Boyd wants to generate more errors for IE users. His, though, are of a distinctly more acerbic character:

“This page may not render properly in Internet Explorer. Please download and use a standards-compliant browser.”

The error bar links, naturally, to Firefox.

I think it’s a brilliant idea. It’s got all the qualities I look for in a solution: it’s elegant and snarky! I’m after him to license the code he used in such a way as to spread it to the less web-savvy but still right-minded public. These kinds of things work through successive stimulation, I think we all agree, so to reach a sort of critical mass everyone would have to use a very similar approach. I hope he takes me up on it.

At any rate, isn’t that a cool idea? Yes. Yes, it is.

Edit: On the other hand, there’s explorerdestroyer.com. It’s twice as snarky and — literally — fifteen times bigger. Ignore that, you!