Goodbye, Internet Explorer Hacks

   design / development / internet explorer / web browsers      Posted on December 15, 2011 by Darin

Yesterday, the Microsoft Windows team announced on their blog, a piece of information that will have web designers and developers across the globe rejoicing. The blog post revealed plans that everyone's most-hated web browser, Internet Explorer, will begin a process in January that will automatically upgrade users to the latest version of the software, Internet Explorer 9.

Citing customer safety, Microsoft says the key aspect behind this push is to protect users against malware, viruses, privacy leaks, and other risks that come with using outdated software. According to Microsoft, 99% of all attacks occur from unpatched, but known, security holes that could be fixed simply by updating to the latest software version. Out of those 99%, 90% of these cases had a security update that had been released for over one year.

While protecting users from the plethora of internet threats is as good of a reason as any to seamlessly update older versions of Internet Explorer, the designer and developer inside of me is excited as the thought of finally sending IE7 and IE8 to their death. For years, IE has been the bane of existence for anyone that has a hand in creating websites and online content. Its inability to parse and display web pages how they were intended to forced many of us to curse the day that we ever wanted to create a website. I, myself, have spent hundreds of additional project hours over the years coding workarounds and hacks just to get things to look and function moderately correct in Internet Explorer that had looked and worked perfectly in every other browser out there.

Now that Internet Explorer 9 allows us to utilize modern technologies like HTML5 and CSS3 to build our sites, content creators worldwide will feel a rush of newfound freedom once these updates begin to take effect. Web standards and interoperability will now be present in all major browsers, allowing us designers and developers to spend less time working out bugs and errors, and more time delivering great web experiences.