Internet Explorer gives a lot of headaches to web developers, because the guys at microsoft was always left behind by Mozilla, Google or Apple with their browsers: Firefox, Chrome and Safari. If you want to build an original design for a website, you do your drawings, export the images, write the code and test it in different browsers. You may have errors that are easy to fix. There are 99% chances that if you run the tests on Chrome, Safari and Firefox to have to same output, but, changes are less than 5% to work well in Internet Explorer. Even if the code is w3 standard compliant, there are some things that won’t work in Internet Explorer ?

Why this is happening ? Why they can’t fix their software ? Well, they do, they work on new software, but their business philosophy is to make you buy the new software and never update the old one. Even if Internet Explorer is free, they have the same thinking. Internet Explorer is a little better. The ones who have tested Internet Explorer 10 in beta version say that it is almost as good as Chrome.

Where is the problem then ? Well, Internet Explorer 10 beta version may be as good as is Chrome today, but when they will oficially release it, Chrome will output at least 2 more improved versions. The css coding advances, there are new rules that are brought, new standards applied. When IE 10 will be released there will be many new attributes that won’t work because they were introduced later than the work on Internet Explorer 10 started. The standards are always upgraded to provide users a better experience and they advance faster than IE project managers can handle it. It usually becomes a standard when Chrome, Firefox and Safari adopts it. Microsoft can’t work that fast, it is too old for this kind of stuff.

More, even IE9 was released more than a year ago ( March 2011 ), there are more users using Internet Explorer 8 than those who use Internet Explorer 9. They do not provide updates to their software automatically, or in a better way.

As far as the market share goes, according to some reports published by W3counter, Statcounter, etc, Chrome is now the leader in the browsing industry. Check the following graphs to see the results.

I think Microsoft Internet Explorer is now on an dead end track.