US Government Bans Vista & Internet Explorer 7
As a Mac enthusiast who also uses PC’s, I thought this Business 2.0 article was pretty funny. DOT bans Vista! Also Internet Explorer 7. Well, I do have some insight on the IE 7 trouble. IE 6 so blatantly violated browser standards that it required some serious coding to support. Plus it was so dominate in the market that people just wrote apps that worked on IE 6 – forget browser compatibility, it’s not important when you get 90% of the market with just 1.
Internet Explorer 7 is far more standards friendly. Said another way, it works NOTHING LIKE IE6. So as I visit Windows IT shops most of them have “No IE7″ policies in place b/c they find all their production web applications are broken. There’s a lot of short term pain here, but in the end IE7 will behave a lot closer to Firefox and other browsers who respect standards, and so these same IT shops will have more choice moving forward.
Microsoft should have produced some sort of help for IT departments needing to migrate their web applications from IE6 to IE7. And who knows, maybe they did – so by all means point me to it if it’s out there.
