Hate is such a harsh word. Why would anybody hate a product that uses a happy, blue little “e” as its symbol?

Web designers, developers, and programmers around the world have plenty of reasons to hate Internet Explorer.

Let’s analyze the three top reasons why web designers hate Internet Explorer.

1. Microsoft stopped innovating in web browsers for a long time.

Let’s backtrack to the year 2001 when “Hanging By A Moment” by Lifehouse was topping the pop charts around the world, and George W. Bush was sitting in the White House. Microsoft was the king of the world in operating systems that year with the advent of Windows XP. As Microsoft found itself as King of the Internets with about a 95% of the web browser market share, the company decided to do nothing for 5 years. Crazy!

Of course, along came Mozilla’s Firefox and other browsers but Microsoft didn’t pay too much attention to them. In the meantime, several bugs started to plague IE6. In some instances, it would take a single line of code to render the browser useless and crash constantly. By the time IE7 came out in 2006, the browsing world was a much different place, and it was too little, too late.

2. Web designers are forced to work with IE6 and IE7.

I just gave you that short history lesson in IE to illustrate the big problem of several millions of people around the world still using IE6 and IE7. Web designers do not enjoy working with IE6 and IE7 because those browsers require them to spend a lot of time figuring out workarounds to features that are standard in more modern versions of browsers.

And by a lot of time, I mean a lot of time because…

3. Even Microsoft retired support to older versions of Internet Explorer.

Given the extensive amount of time that Microsoft developers were spending on creating patches for security vulnerabilities, in March 2011 Microsoft urged web users to stop using IE6 in favor of newer versions of Internet Explorer.

As a matter of fact, Microsoft no longer provides mainstream tech support for Internet Explorer 6. Imagine how hard must be troubleshooting issues for this browser that even its maker refuses to continue providing technical support for it!

Even the most well-meaning of web designers cannot keep on providing tech support to older versions of Internet, because the necessary time and cost for research is too prohibitive. Even Google discontinued support for IE6 in 2010.

Takeaway Point

The reasons why web designers hate Internet Explorer teach us how important is to upgrade to more modern versions of software to avoid vulnerability threats and make the lives of our developers much easier. Just like Microsoft and Google dropped support for older browser versions, you need to be able to upgrade to newer versions of your favorite browsers.

With its limitations and bugs, older versions of browsers hinder web designers and expose your computer and system to unnecessary risks. Let’s work together in upgrading our web browsers.