The develors have their own thoughts about standards and needed components. Because of that, the fault-tolerant IE has not a lack of features, the features reach from filters for picutres and fonts to many small html additions. The problem is just that there exist more browsers than just the IE, which don't care about the microsoft standards, but use the official standards of the W3C and similar organisations. This does not fit with the microsoft concept, which says that as much as possible of the used/support protocols, interface features and finished programs should be made by microsoft's own developers. This is the reason, why the Internet Explorer is so different. This marketing concept makes it hard for both microsoft and the web developers. So microsoft had to forget about their business concept with the version 7 of their browser and to adhere to the official standards to adjust the IE6, which is in bad accordance with the official standards and therefore with the minimum demand of the users, to today's demands.

The Internet Explorer would be likely the absolutely leading browser if he would stick with the official requirements. There would be nearly no reason to switch to other browsers like the Firefox. It is necessary for that to see the signs of time and to relinquish the internal concepts. However microsoft hasn't done this, and so the only reason why the IE is so often used is, that it is installed on every windows computer by default and that the unexperienced users don't know the alternatives and don't see the need for a switch.

The biggest problem for web developers is the incompatibility of all IE versions with the CSS standards. This way the IE often makes the design of websites a tough work, which result is a more or less compatible website with many partly unclean work-arounds and solutions.

But the Internet Explorer is due to the problem of the common usage not an unknown force between today's browsers. It is almost deathly for a webdesigner to decide not to support the IE. It is a hard work to create webdesigns which are compatible with all browsers, but the additional work pays off. To design for all browser, it is important to be an experienced developer. One knows the strengths and disadvantages of a browser with great experience only. Having this knowledge, it is possible to create designs for all browsers. You just should not test with only one browser like the Firefox to notice at the end that it looks horrible viewed with the Internet Explorer. It is possible to prevent this from happening by doing parallel testing with multiple browsers. Even Linux users aren't exclueded from this way of development, as the developers put great efforts in porting the IE render engine in different versions to the linux platform. These possibilities should be used urgently.

Exceptions are internal (!) company websites, if Firefox is installed per default on all the computers.

Autor: PowerProgrammer
Translation from German to English done by Yarcanox