IE and China Airlines
Gunjan and I are going away for the Holidays in December and have been researching prices of flights to various countries. While seeing how much it cost to get to Asia, I went to China Airline’s website (using Firefox of course) and was greeted with a javascript alert that said “Please useing IE6.0 or later !”. Man, I thought those days were long gone…
I wonder what impact IE7 will have on the world of web design? Will it stop or slow the movement towards Firefox? Does the general public even care about what web browser they use, or do they see a web browser as a commodity? In my opinion, Firefox’s increased market share played a large part in Microsoft’s move to push out IE7, fix bugs in their rendering engine and try to adhere to standards. If Firefox continues to slowly eat away at IE’s dominance, I think we will see not only more development of IE from Microsoft, but also more of a convergence towards accepted standards.
Let’s face it, the browser is becoming more and more important every year. Applications that once required a desktop platform can now be moved online and dispersed via the internet. For that reason alone, IE is very important to Microsoft.