UPDATE
Okay, so perhaps I was a little bit harsh on Trident- the CSS 2.1 portions of the new design for sw.slr work flawlessly in IE8, so with Dean Edwards’ Javascript libraries, the CSS3 portions should work sufficiently as well.
So I’ve decided to rephrase my position as “reducing” support for IE- it is still an inferior rendering engine, and its use is on the decline compared to alternatives such as Firefox, Opera and Safari. I’m going to attempt to get the new design working as best I can in IE (I’ve got the Multi-IE package installed, so I could possibly get it functional in IE 3 :-P), but I’m still going to continue focusing on standards-compliant browsers (which does now include IE8 by the looks of things).
The actual number of people using IE on sw.slr is only in 3-digit figures, whereas other browsers have 4 and 5 digit figures (the majority of IE users are using IE7, which means they’re more likely to use IE8 when it gets a stable release).
original post:
I’ve had it with Trident. It’s an obsolete rendering engine. I’ve been experimenting with a new design for my sw.slr project (its a miracle I can make anything look aesthetically pleasing :-P ), only to have it held up by trying to make it work in Internet Explorer.
There’s a tiny part of the CSS specification that has been in there since 1998. Coming up on 11 years, and Internet Explorer doesn’t support it. Its bloody ridiculous.
So, rather than employ a bunch of hacks in order to try and get it working almost the same, or changing the underlying code just to make it work in IE (when it already works fine in every other modern browser), I’ve decided to official drop support for Internet Explorer- at least until a version of it is released that supports the portions of the CSS standard that I’m using.
Well, you’d just be missing a little bit less than half the world’s Internet population :) (and of course it depends from blog to blog; on mine, there are just 24% using IE).
World-wide, IE still has 44.8% (less than FF): http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
The majority of the people using sw.slr are using Firefox, Opera or Safari, so I’m not going to be missing out that many people.
The problem lies in the fact that despite the relatively new IE7, it still doesn’t support the display:table-cell; property (the aforementioned tiny part of the spec thats been around since 1998).
I’ve published a draft of the new design on my dev server, so you can see how it’ll look (and comment/make feature requests etc.) before its deployed.
You can also see how obsolete Trident is by opening it in Internet Explorer.
p.s. take a look at what IE users will see when they try to visit the site from now on :-P