The Explorer Tax: How Microsoft's buggy browser costs us billions of dollars

Updated October 29, 2008

One of the biggest challenges in web design is dealing with problems present in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. Because Explorer —  especially Explorer 6 — has buggy implementation of Cascading Style Sheets (the foundation of any site design), it costs businesses billions of dollars of lost productivity. Web development teams are forced to modify and “hack” their CSS code to get the page to display properly in Explorer, even though better standards-compliant browsers display the page just fine.

TAKE ACTION NOW! Stop using Internet Explorer. Get Apple's beautiful Safari browser (highly recommended!)  and/or Firefox instead. The more people who stop using Internet Explorer, the lower our collective Explorer Tax will be!

When Microsoft released early versions of Explorer in the early Internet boom, it did so hastily.  Explorer 3, the first version to support CSS, came out in 1996. At that point, I was working as a web designer at  one of just 10 sites in a contract with Microsoft to showcase this new thing called CSS. As I struggled to get our website to display correctly in Explorer, I experienced what so many developers have since — the frustration of coding for a buggy browser. That experience left me with a bad taste for Microsoft's Internet Explorer; it took years to warm up to CSS after that.

Microsoft rushed Explorer to market even though it was full of CSS bugs, and since then, they've barely fixed any of the problems. Microsoft has been so distracted by dealing with endless Windows attacks that they've made little effort to address CSS bugs in their browser. [This situation has improved with the release of Explorer 7, but even version 7 falls far behind Safari or Firefox as a good compliant browser].

Microsoft, by hijacking the evolution of browsers when they created Explorer in order to dislodge Netscape, cost us all. They created a market where the majority browser, Explorer, had bugs which were difficult to figure out and correct for. Web developers could easily make their designs work properly in Netscape (and then later the modern browsers like Safari and Firefox), but Explorer almost always caused problems.

And Explorer, right through the current version 7, still has countless bugs. Working through bugs in its rendering of CSS is probably the single most discussed issue in CSS design. Web development is less advanced now than it would have been if Explorer didn't require so much attention; web development costs more because of Explorer's bugs. Website developers, instead of focusing on their customer's needs, are forced to spend a significant portion of their time just dealing with bugs in Explorer.

Explorer bugs, then, are a tax on web development. Explorer bugs are basically a “cost of doing business,” and as with all external costs, it gets handed up through the food chain from freelance developer to business client to consumer. So Explorer's bugs are really a tax on all of us.

Since the beginning of CSS-dominant web design (around 1997), the cost of building websites has been higher than it needed to be thanks to Explorer's bugs. We are still paying this tax; my latest stats show that some 65% of visitors to average public websites are using Explorer. Every website I design to this day requires an extra level of hacking to account for Explorer's bugs.

What a tragic waste of human effort. Thanks, Microsoft, for this wholly unnecessary drain on the world economy.

See also:

• Improve your browsing now: Get Apple's Safari and/or Mozilla's Firefox (both are available for PC and Mac)
• CSS list spacing bug in Internet Explorer 6/7
• The Internet Explorer 6 tax

Technorati Tags: CSS, InternetExplorer, Microsoft, productivity, tax, WebDesign