{"id":19222,"date":"2017-04-24T08:27:40","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T08:27:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/codewebbarcelona.com\/cuando-disenabamos-webs-para-internet-explorer\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T21:35:46","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T21:35:46","slug":"when-we-designed-websites-for-internet-explorer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/codewebbarcelona.com\/en\/when-we-designed-websites-for-internet-explorer\/","title":{"rendered":"When We Designed Websites for Internet Explorer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gone are the days when designing any website<\/strong> meant making sure it would display properly in our beloved Internet Explorer<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Back then, the vast majority of users relied on Internet Explorer<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m talking about the era when Internet Explorer 6.0 ruled the browser world<\/strong>. A king, perhaps a bit dim-witted, possibly the result of a little too much inbreeding\u2014something commoners like us can\u2019t quite grasp, but royalty… Well, just watch Game of Thrones and you\u2019ll get the idea. Or read up on the succession history of a certain Spanish family.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How things have changed!<\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

It was 2009, and Firefox<\/strong> had been battling\u2014mostly in vain\u2014to 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\u2019s ally in this long struggle for dominance. At the time, Internet Explorer 6.0 came pre-installed on every computer running Windows XP\u2014which was most computers.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t just IE6 we had to worry about. Versions 7 and 8 had also arrived, and they didn\u2019t exactly make things easier. Each brought its own special \u201cdeveloper, we\u2019re going to ruin your day\u201d 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\u2019s Cube\u2014fix a visual bug in version 7, and it would break in 6 and 8, and vice versa.<\/p>\n

Internet Explorer was the problem child. The spoiled kid who needed a special meal, or else he just wouldn\u2019t eat.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The battle to build any website<\/h2>\n

Building the CSS layout for any website was a real ordeal<\/strong>. You had to make the same design work across all versions of Explorer, which, as mentioned, didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Most of the time, you\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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Designing a website today<\/h2>\n

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 \u201cspecial\u201d features, it behaves reasonably well.<\/p>\n

You could say that today\u2019s 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 \u201cDrill Sergeant\u201d wouldn\u2019t do them any harm.
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