Internet Explorer is not free

May 14, 2006

I’ve said it many times before: Internet Explorer is not free and IE is not free and Oh yeah, Internet Explorer is not free and Hey, by the way, Internet Explorer is not free.

I’ve said it time and time again, but now someone else has raised the question: How Much Is That Browser in the Windows OS?:

Just how many hours of productivity have been lost to making Web page code work inside of Internet Explorer? Personally, I know that I’ve spent the equivalent of hundreds of man hours coaxing standards-compliant code to render properly in the I.E. world view, and the companies I’ve worked for have probably logged tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of man hours doing the same. When you add up all the effort similarly expended by designers, studios and corporations of all kinds all over the world and over the past five or ten years, it’s got to be an enormously expensive number; if you were to assign hourly rates to all that time, it might total in the billions of dollars.

Safari may not be free (it only comes with the latest version of Mac OS X) but at least you don’t have to spend hours retrofitting your compliant site to work in Safari.

Previous post:

Next post: