Apathy Sketchpad

This comment was posted on the My New Coins page the other day, by someone calling himself “Boggus Wartus”:

Fuck off with your bullshit comments about browsers.  If you like Firefox that’s fine, but don’t tell other people what they should or should not be using.  Wanker.

I deleted it, because it was abusive and not relevant to the page, and I don’t really need that on a page which, since being featured in the b3ta newsletter, has racked up over 5000 hits and 97% of the site’s total pageviews. But I pride myself on the openness of my comment system so I thought I’d air it here and respond properly.

First of all, fuck you, Bogwart. The notice in question appears at the top of the page when using Microsoft Internet Explorer, and is there because the browser in question fails to correctly render my website, and I’d rather people realised it was because I can’t be bothered making special efforts to accommodate bad browsers than they thought I was just incompetent. Internet Explorer makes up less than 40% of the traffic to this site, usually, but if I made the site render properly in IE it would probably have taken 70% of the effort involved in making the layout. That doesn’t suit me. The “bullshit comment” reads

Note: Your browser is displaying this page incorrectly because your browser is crap. I know it comes with Windows and I know it’s easy to find and I know it’s the simple option, but honestly it’s the worst browser available. Get Opera or Firefox if you want to browse webpages. (I recommend Opera.) Go and do it now. It’s okay; I’ll wait.

I don’t think I’m being overly political there. I’m not saying people ’should’ switch for any reason other than “Firefox is better”. I don’t even say I like Firefox: I explicitly recommended Opera over it. I’m no more being a wanker than a critic is being a wanker when recommending one film/book/videogame over another.

But ultimately, I could have got political. I could have said that Internet Explorer’s non-standard and proprietary behaviour makes it distinct from true HTML web browsers, and the fact that it’s bundled with the only widespread operating system for non-technical PC users means that its rules, which other browsers aren’t allowed to mimic, become a de-facto standard. This is clearly either an abuse of Microsoft’s monopoly designed to make other operating systems impractical or else it’s just incompetence.

I could point out that IE is full of security holes — they even managed to sneak one into the JPEG display code, which I wouldn’t have thought was possible — and that this meant I was forced to choose between ’standard’ looking websites and security. I could point out that, while Firefox and Opera certainly crash sometimes (and to be honest I’ve never used a browser I really like — Safari is gorgeous but just doesn’t have enough functionality for me) they don’t do so nearly as often or spectacularly as IE — taking down the taskbar and any file browsing windows I may be using.

There are moral, standards-based, functional, security and practical reasons to avoid using IE. I don’t think I’m a wanker for advocating that.

I’m just amazed that Bogwart took it so personally.