At Online Dialogue we are engaged in A/B testing on a daily basis, we do this for many different clients, target groups and browsers. We notice with our clients that many of their visitors still use Internet Explorer. This brings along the necessary problems, because developing for Internet Explorer can sometimes be ‘impossible’ because it is so outdated. But what problems are there when developing for Internet Explorer? How come? Why is it still used so much by some audiences? And what are the solutions? 

Emerging problems Internet Explorer (IE)

After the first ‘browser wars’ (Internet Explorer vs. Netscape Navigator), the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C) founded. This organization ensures consistency between different browsers, think the same web standards, programming languages and plugins.

At the time of the founding of the W3C, Microsoft had virtually a monopoly on the browser market and chose to go their own way in terms of Web standards and also developed their own Web tools such as ActiveX and Silverlight, on which Web pages and applications can be built. However, these work only in the IE browser.

This caused developers to have to program web pages and applications multiple times: for both the browsers that adhere to the W3C standards, and for IE that adheres to its own system.

Internet Explorer vs. other browsers

There are major differences between the system used by IE and the W3C standards used by the rest of the browsers. For example, the other browsers are focused on speed, security and improving develop capabilities. Also, these browsers are updated frequently, while the last version of IE came out 7 years ago....

This means that IE has not been updated with new features for 7 years, and it has never fully implemented the web standards of the time (let alone current standards). IE is also always updated in batches, which means that if a security bug is found and the next update is not scheduled until next month, it will take a month to fix the security bug. For this reason, IE is also known as an insecure browser.

Over time, the difference between IE and other browsers began to be noticed by users and people began to switch to another browser. Microsoft still tried to keep IE in line with the rest of the browsers, but IE was already too far behind.

Internet Explorer security issues

Although IE was once a secure browser, that is far from the case at the moment. As mentioned earlier, IE still gets security updates, but they are still done in batches. This is not a wise course of action with the speed at which cyber threats are developed today.

IE has noticed this several times already. Microsoft has already made several appealed to users of IE to stop using the browser. This follows a number of security breaches in which hackers were able to access users' PCs through IE and add, modify and delete data.

Microsoft no longer sees IE as useful browser

The head of security at Microsoft, Chris Jackson, has indicated that Microsoft no longer considers IE a usable browser.

For example, he wrote on March 12, 2019 the following:

“You see, Internet Explorer is a compatibility solution, we're not supporting new web standards for it and, while many sites work fine, developers by and large just aren't testing for Internet Explorer these days. They are testing on modern browsers. So, if we continued our previous approach, you would end up in a scenario where, by optimizing for the things you have, you end up not being able to use new apps as they come out. As new apps are coming out with greater frequency, what we want to help you do is avoid having to miss out on a progressively larger portion of the web.”

Why is Internet Explorer still used so much?

In practice, many people still use IE. Thus, it was usage of IE on desktop in 2019 still 4.6%, which is huge for an insecure browser on which many website don't work properly. But why do so many people still use IE?

There are a few reasons for this:

• IE was always very good as an enterprise application (enterprise: larger companies with a lot of data traffic). As a result, many companies fully incorporated IE and its associated system. Consider developing their own enterprise applications and web pages based on ActiveX and Silverlight (both work only in IE).
• Companies are sticking with IE because of the browser's better data handling or because it is simply too time- and cost-intensive to convert the entire system to a more modern one.
• Then, of course, we have the general home user. Users still using an outdated version of Windows where IE is still the default browser set. They are used to IE, but are not aware of the security risks and thus continue to use IE.
• There are also a number of Web structures in Windows that to this day are still automatically opened with IE. Structures such as “MIME encapsulation of aggregate HTML documents” (.mht .mhtml) and “Extensible Hypertext Markup Language” (.xht .xhtml). Now these structures are hardly ever used, but should a user open one of these structures, IE is started and they often remain on it.

Leave IE in the past

IE has been considered an outdated browser for several years. It has never met full Web standards and is no longer updated. In addition, its use poses a major security risk.

Current developers take little to no account of it anymore, so chances are you'll come across a website or web app that doesn't work or only works partially. However, there are (unfortunately) still reasons for users to have to use IE. Such as users working in a company that use applications or Web pages that can only be opened with IE.

Beyond these specific web pages and applications, it is absolutely advisable to use a modern browser for security, to ensure that you receive the optimal web experience and the fact that Microsoft itself advises against using IE as the default web browser.

At Online Dialogue, we now often exclude IE users from A/B testing and designs. This does bring its own problems, for example because the sample is less representative. Especially if a large part of a client's visitors are still IE users. There is a steady decline in IE use, now it is hoped that this continues 🙂 And for the IE users among us: time to switch!