Gone are the days when designing any website meant making sure it would display properly in our beloved Internet Explorer.
Back then, the vast majority of users relied on Internet Explorer.
I’m talking about the era when Internet Explorer 6.0 ruled the browser world. A king, perhaps a bit dim-witted, possibly the result of a little too much inbreeding—something commoners like us can’t quite grasp, but royalty… Well, just watch Game of Thrones and you’ll get the idea. Or read up on the succession history of a certain Spanish family.
How things have changed!
It was 2009, and Firefox had been battling—mostly in vain—to dethrone Internet Explorer 6.0 from its spot as the most-used web browser. Not long before, Google Chrome had joined the fray as Firefox’s ally in this long struggle for dominance. At the time, Internet Explorer 6.0 came pre-installed on every computer running Windows XP—which was most computers.
But it wasn’t just IE6 we had to worry about. Versions 7 and 8 had also arrived, and they didn’t exactly make things easier. Each brought its own special “developer, we’re going to ruin your day” quirks. The cure was worse than the disease: now, we had to make sure a website looked right in three different versions of IE, each interpreting CSS in its own peculiar way. It was like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube—fix a visual bug in version 7, and it would break in 6 and 8, and vice versa.
Internet Explorer was the problem child. The spoiled kid who needed a special meal, or else he just wouldn’t eat.
The battle to build any website
Building the CSS layout for any website was a real ordeal. You had to make the same design work across all versions of Explorer, which, as mentioned, didn’t even play nice with each other. And after wrestling with all those visual bugs, the site still had to look right in the other decent browsers: Firefox and Chrome.
Most of the time, you’d run into endless problems, usually caused by the ugly (and only) ways to hack CSS rules for Explorer. In short, designing and building a site for multiple browsers meant the difficulty level increased exponentially.
Designing a website today
Fortunately, things have changed a lot, and the landscape is much more stable now. Internet Explorer accounts for only about 4% of web users. And to be fair, in its latest versions, even though it still lacks support for many of the newer “special” features, it behaves reasonably well.
You could say that today’s new-generation front-end developer who complains about the challenges of building a website is a bit like a millennial compared to our grandparents who did military service. Honestly, a few days with the legendary “Drill Sergeant” wouldn’t do them any harm.