Okay, yeah, the title is a little bit of link bait, I admit it. Deal with it.

Internet Explorer has started to gain a small following in what I can only guess is some sort of developer-hipster hybrid community, and I’ve got a bone to pick with those people.

Internet Explorer 6, which born in the summer of 2001, and still exists as a force, albeit a shrinking force, in the world of website design. There have been three new versions of Internet Explorer released in this nine years since.

That’s my history lesson.

But the real thing to counter is the claim that IE9 being better means it’s cool and hip to use IE again! I’m not arguing that IE9 is better, not at all, but I am arguing against its use anyway.

If tech geeks and power users start losing cohesion on the “anything but IE” mindset, the war against the terrible force that is Internet Explorer will falter. Script kiddies will stop seeing IE as forbidden, power users will stop secretly switching all of their family’s desktop icons, sons will no longer tell their mothers that IE causes angels to cry!

I get you have to use it for work because you have to test against it, that’s not the problem I want to address. Just those people who have decided IE9 is an acceptable solution for browsing when they don’t have to.

So a few reasons why I want to keep arguing against it, and why we as a community of nerds and programming junkies should keep up the good fight.

#1 It’s still not right

You can argue ’til you’re blue in the face, but there’s still a lot of things missing from IE.

* Forms Validation

* Web Sockets

* Spellcheck

* HTML5 History

Don’t try to argue with those. Those and many more additions are all listed as new in IE10, which will be released along side Windows 8, and will be Windows 7 and 8 only.

#2 The upgrade cycle

A lot of people like to bemoan the upgrade cycles of Chrome and Firefox, especially those people who have hopped on the IE9 train. I feel your pain, I really do.

But worse than a too fast cycle that sometimes causes addons to stop working unexpectedly?

A cycle that is laboriously slow.

Now, that slow development cycle might be great for a corporation with a locked down update policy (and we’ll discuss this some other time), but for personal use and browsing that means a long gap between major features being released. How long?

Well, IE7 was released in October of 2006, five years after IE6. IE8 was released in March of 2009. IE9 wasn’t released until March of 2011. All in all a decade of web development saw only four major editions of Internet Explorer.

Why is that bad?

Frankly the web moves faster than that, and so does technology. Don’t agree? I can’t help you. Javascript has been a mainstay for years, and it didn’t get to a good state until IE9s release earlier this year.

#3 Fragmentation

IE almost encourages a kind of “This is my version” mentality from users. They click “Don’t remind me” when windows prompts them to update. I don’t know why this is, and I try not to think about it too much.

You can’t break this habit. If it was possible to get people on the latest IE and get them to upgrade when the time came, I’d say great! But it’s not.

IE6 and IE7 combined still make up about 25% of IE users. Even windows XP users can upgrade to 8.

Conclusion

The goal should be to continue to break the habit of IE use. Nothing about Internet Explorer is going to change long term, they will maintain a enterprise-comfortable update cycle and fragmentation will continue to be an issue.

Just let it die already.