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Why to Say Goodbye to IE8

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Category: Trends
ie8

I've been ranting a bit about Internet Explorer 8 a bit lately.  I know that the overwhelming majority of people reading this don't use it, but you may very well know someone who does.  (According to w3schools.com, 4.8% of browsing is still done with IE8.)  So, be a good friend, relative or neighbor, and help them say goodbye to IE8.  Trust me; it's for their own good.  Here are just a few reasons why.

1) It hinders the browsing experience.

Many sites simply cannot be loaded properly in IE8 because it does not support many major features and functions that all major browsers support.  The last time I checked, HTML5 Demos had a list of 31 standard HTML5 capabilities.  IE could not handle a majority of them.  It's not just those fancy-shmancy sites either.  According to Neowin, the following sites can't be properly viewed in IE8: msn.com.cn, yahoo.com, ebay.com, facebook.com, apple.com, flickr.com, dell.com and ... get this ... microsoft.com

2) It is slow as Christmas.

Back in the day TechRadar ran some tests comparing IE8 with FireFox and Chrome.  Not surprisingly, IE8 came in dead last in all but one category.  (It beat out FireFox in memory used when only 1 tab is open.)  When real world JavaScript test were done the numbers were staggering: Firefox 3.1 - 1771.4ms, IE8 - 6837.6ms, Chrome - 1923.0ms  (Please note that since this time, the other browsers have become faster and smaller.)

3) It is a creative drowstone.

Unless you're one of the big guys and just don't care about a user's experience, you want all of your views to have a positive experience with you website.  That becomes problematic if you try to factor in the few people using IE8.  Odds are your website developer has some very nice features and functions in store for your website.  If those concepts don't fit the narrow framework of IE8, you are doomed to have a website that would not quite have been up to 2009 standards.  This slows down progress!

4) Even Microsoft has moved on.

As one last point, I would like to emphasize that it's not like the manufacturers themselves consider IE8 a viable option for today's web.  They've released two other versions since then and are working on a third!  So, please, do us all a favor and download Chrome, Firefox, Safari or (if you just have to) IE10.