IE 6 woes..

Yesterday, I was at the Ajax conference in Boston. This is where you can expect to meet the leading developers as well as the thought leaders who are pushing the limits and shaping the future of the Ajax technologies.

Here, my worst fears came true when I mentioned that I have architected an IE only solution and worst yet IE6 is the primary target platform. Several of them I talked to, looked at me like I am a crazy person. Throughout the conference, and through several presentations, I have not seen anyone opening an IE browser! It is a well known general consensus among the technical community that IE is not a suitable platform to build current generation web applications, and RDC 4.5.3 development experience is no different.

To begin with, current generation browsers (IE or otherwise) are not a suitable platform to build RDC like applications anyway, and that is a topic for a different post. But IE (specifically IE6) significantly lags behind others like Firefox both as a development platform as well as the final deployed runtime environment.

A top notch debugger + profiler + network analyzer all combined into one Firefox extension called Firebug alone is the reason why it is a joy to develop serious AJAX clients in Firefox. There is nothing equivalent available for IE. We ended up creating our own profiler for IE and continually switched between Firefox and IE for development. I can't imagine how much time we could have saved, had the Firefox been the target platform.

We had to find and fix significant memory leaks in IE, which to a major extent non-existent in Firefox. There is a considerable performance difference between IE6 and IE7 let alone between IE and Firefox. We had to do significant re-design and optimization work to bring IE6 performance to acceptable levels. To add to the list, Firefox supports SVG natively and IE does not. Native vector graphics support is one of the critical needs for RDC 4.5.3 and for several others I met at the conference. We had to code work-arounds for significant bugs we found in IE6.

Bottom line is - on one hand businesses are demanding all applications to be web applications and run them in a browser. But on the other hand, they seem to choose an inferior platform to deploy these applications. It is time businesses start giving serious consideration and start looking at better IE alternatives available in the market today or influence Microsoft (if they can) to give us a better and feature rich browser..