Today, my co-worker found that the web-application he developed worked only in Firefox, and it didn’t work in Internet Explorer(IE). He immediately asked me if we should ignore the IE users or not.

I know that he was working on JQuery(Javascript). It is not surprised that IE does not support the standard JQuery. However, it doesn’t mean that we can simply remove our support to IE users. In fact, IE still have more than 55% of market share today, while Firefox have around 30% only.(See here for more information) It’s too early(and not responsible) to ignore such a large user group.

So, after he complained about how fxxking the IE was for an hour, I tried to find out that the problem. I found that the problem came from his code rather than from IE. He had an extra tag in his code. Firefox was so smart to catch the error and ignore it. That’s why it only worked in Firefox, but not in IE.

So, here are what I’ve learned today:

• The error catching function introduced in Firefox is so good. But at the same time, it makes some developers lazier by not verifying the quality of their works. They will think it is your problem if you are using IE.

• IE sucks, but it is not an excuse of leaving the IE users behind.

• Complaining has nothing to do to improve the problem. Talk is cheap, do it.

Next time before you complain to your manager about how fxxking the IE is, think twice.