See, most people wouldn't notice the difference between using IE or another, vastly superior internet browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or Opera. And I don't have a problem with that. The problem is that, I'm a web developer, and when I have waste time writing the same code TWICE because MS is so fucking stubborn on not following any fucking standart out there, it pisses me off to no end.

Instead of following what everyone does, and making their products compatible with the rules and standars clearly outlined and widely known, they decided long ago that they are the fucking kings of everything and that everyone should pander to their own way of how things should be. And you know, 8 years ago that wasn't so bad. After all, they were the majority, they ruled the webspace. No one cared about supporting a web browser that was used by less than 0.5% of the population. IE was king, and their word was the rule.

But things changed. IE is still the most used browser, but that statistic is going in decline (rightously so), and in some places other browsers like Firefox are gaining the upper hand with the users.

But this isn't a rant about that. It's about how they are still fucking stubborn about adapting. IE8 was supposed to be a browser capable of competing with the previously mentioned superior browsers out there. But guess what, they failed again, and failed hard. Let's look at one brief example. Say you want to set the opacity of an element through css. To do this in any fucking browser out there, all you have to do is:

opacity: 0.5;

Simple enough right? Well microsoft said that was pure bullshit, and in previous versions of IE, you had to add this line, exclusive for IE, to make that simple task work:

filter: alpha(opacity=0.5);

And you can say, well that's not too bad. And yeah it isn't until you have to spend developing time figuring out why your crap is working on every damn browser but in ie. Then you have to figure out the little nuances, like how the code above won't work by itself because you have to position the element (even if it doesn't needs explicit positioning) to make it work.

And you can say, well IE8 promised to adhere to every standart out there, so we designers and developers don't have to waste time on finding what the fuck was that developer smoking when he decided to do things their way. Well, you're WRONG.

-ms-filter:"progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=50)";

What the fuck?

I mean... what the fuck is this shit? come on. Throw us a bone out here. This is just but one example of what can make you want to tear your hair out. There's javascript functions tailor-made for IE, shit like the previous example in css, even stupid simple shit like XML.

I don't know what could ever be the thinking behind the turds who think that STILL going against the norm is a good idea in this day. Designers and developers hate this, and guess what, your market share is shriking, which means that probably, you will see websites that will treat you like how we treated Netscape some years ago. As the black sheep who nobody wants to support.

I'm not one of those Firefox militant assholes, nor I am trying to sell anyone to change to another browser. I used to love Firefox and use it everyday and recommend it to everyone that wanted a better internet experience, but as soon as I started using Google Chrome I changed in a heartbeat. It's still buggy, but its a simple browser packed with a lot of good ideas an functionality, and very light (in my experience). I'm just a developer who hates to waste time on simple things that should be that, SIMPLE. What I'm trying to say here is, I don't care what the most used browser is, but when the most used browser is still pulling bullshit like this on us, it's hard to not publicly burn it at the stake.

So here I am sitting on my desk, thinking "What does these series of tubes need? and how can I help clogging them?", and as I took the last sip from my morning coffee, I just had an epiphany: "Clearly, what the internets need is another guy posting stuff that noone will care about, the intarwebs need another useless blog about random stuff. It needs me."