This all started with the following post.... which I wrote about a month ago. Something had to be done. Anyway, here it is:
If you google "internet explorer pie chart", then look at the images, the very first thing... the very top of the list is this:
Right now I'm trying to put together my CV site - and it's working in all browsers except IE, and the reason it doesn't work in IE, is that if you set the opacity of an absolutely positioned element, it (and this is the magical part) removes the browser scrollbars. Why? Why in the name of anything remotely sane would anyone want to do that? I'm gradually coming round to the notion that I should just boycott IE. People who use it need to get used to the idea that it simply doesn't work very well... but this is supposed to be a CV site. It's supposed to showcase things working... so I'm spending a large (look at the pie chart) chunk of time that I could spend on something else, dealing with a dismal anachronism. (Cut to) One of my favourite TED things is Clay Shirky talking about Cognitive Surplus.
It revolves around the measure of time that entire populations have free, simply to think... (and as a natural extension, create, build etc). In the late 20th century television took up a lot of this potential, but that is starting to change. "The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.". He's inspired (and is inspiring) about the possibilities created by this sudden explosion of available, collective intelligence. .. and inevitably, being a web developer, I see the hours, days, weeks, months I waste with Internet Explorer in these terms. Internet explorer is a crashing waste of cognitive surplus... and more specifically, it's a crashing waste of cognitive surplus to MY industry. My people. The people who are building this digital revolution that's unfolding before our eyes. It's wasting our time... if Internet Explorer didn't exist, we'd be able to do... not twice exactly, but... 10%? 20%? 30%? more than we're currently doing. This is holding us back. There has got to be a way of stopping this. The reason that pie chart is at the top of google is because every web developer that has to deal with it feels the same. This is our internet... we live in it and we built most of it... if anyone can get rid of this thing it should be us.
