Short Thoughts

Sympathy for Internet Explorer and BP

Please allow me to introduce myself: I’m a man of wealth and taste.

If that’s not the tune you started humming when you read the title of this blog post, then either you’re out of touch with your rock ‘n roll legends, or you’re far more magnanimous than the majority of the Internet-using, gasoline-consuming, taxpaying public.

If you’re a web developer, or an even slightly more than decently competent computer user, chances are you’ve grown to hate Internet Explorer; if you’ve been following current events even a little, it’s equally likely that you’ve developed a healthy dislike for oil giant BP (and by healthy, I mean anything ranging from passing disapproval to standing on a street corner with a sandwich sign proclaiming them as the devil).

I wouldn’t dare suggest that a major multi-billion-dollar corporation is in need of our sympathy. I would, however, argue that a general lack of understanding of a situation can result in some vilification that just simply isn’t deserved. Let me explain.

The other day I was having a conversation with a few of my coworkers at [redacted]. The subject of web development came up, and as graphic designers and web developers on lunch break, the conversation eventually rolled around to the inevitable lambasting of Internet Explorer, the “scourge of the Internet.” If you’ve never taken part in one of these conversations, let me tell you, they get vicious enough to make a 19th century sailor uncomfortable. Usually I have no problem taking part in a little good natured IE bashing, but this time, I played devil’s advocate. The following is a glorified version of what happened that makes me look like a hero.

“You know,” I said to the crowd of nerds and non-nerds alike gathered around me, “I disagree. We’re being entirely unfair to the Internet Explorer team and its accomplishments.”

General laughter ensued, but my face stayed serious.

“I’m not kidding, guys — have you ever stopped to think about the enormous challenges that that group of engineers has had to deal with?” The table grew quiet for a moment. “That’s what I thought. You know, when we use our shiny WebKit-based browsers like Safari and Chrome, it seems pretty easy to make fun of Internet Explorer for how far behind it is when it comes to web standards. The fact is, though, Safari and Firefox and all of the browsers we celebrate were introduced with phenomenal standards support from day 1. When Internet Explorer was introduced, the web was still a toddler.”

A kind of inquisitive tension hung in the air, so I decided to continue, a bit more boldly. “And I know it’s hard for us to admit, but Internet Explorer? Yeah, they still have greater than 50% marketshare by most estimates. That’s a lot of people, and honestly, most of them don’t give a flying fadoodle about web standards; they care about being able to visit the websites they want to visit without any hassles.”

“Safari, and Chrome, and Firefox, and Opera — they have the freedom to push web standards because honestly, their target audience is both more technologically savvy, and much smaller, than Internet Explorer’s. Internet Explorer has to cater to the lowest common denominator, both in terms of users, and in terms of websites that were specifically designed to rely on Internet Explorer’s ‘looseness’ with the standards.”

“Go download the current preview of Internet Explorer 9, and visit an HTML5-heavy website. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But is it awful? No, it isn’t, and that’s more than you can say for IE 6, or 7, or even 8. In fact, there are some areas where IE 9 surpasses even Safari 5 in standards support. The team has been working obscenely hard, and has been fully transparent about it the entire time. It’s true, there was a time in Microsoft’s past when they didn’t care one iota about web standards, but that time is long gone. The fact that they’ve been able to make such a giant leap forward in modern web standards support, combatting 15 years of old code and negative philosophy, and all with minimal breakage to existing sites — baggage that neither Safari nor Firefox ever had to deal with — is nothing short of astounding. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the Internet Explorer team, and they don’t deserve our bitching.”

Glorified as it may be, I actually did say those last two lines, and call me a sappy nerd, but I said it on the verge of tears. The thing that we forget in all this mess is that behind every corporate façade, there are real people — and not just real people, but real people who actually really do care about their work. Just as I put a part of myself into Bowtie and the other projects I work on, there is love in Internet Explorer, and I’m sure lots of blood, sweat, and tears to go with it. It’s not something people stop to think about, but I don’t believe it’s a perspective that should be ignored.

And that brings us to BP. Earlier this evening, I was talking with one of my roommates about the oil spill. I made a comment that I thought the amount of time it had taken BP to simply stop the leakage of oil from the pipeline was completely unacceptable. “Well…” replied my business major roommate, “for starters, it’s a mile underwater.” As he continued to speak, another side to things became clearer. I am not an expert on oil disaster recovery, nor is most of the world’s population; the people working on the project for BP? Well, they are. As much as we may not like to accept that big business is actually giving a damn, the fact is, it’s entirely possible that the problem is just not as simple as we’d like to believe: many of the challenges BP is facing in containing the issue live in uncharted territory. There are a lot of firsts going on here.

Does that make the fact that the oil spill occurred in the first place any more excusable? Not in the least. There are things that every party involved did wrong, and it’s quite probable that people higher up in the company knew that something like this could and would eventually happen. But just because management and corporate history is full of “business as usual” for an oil company, that doesn’t mean that the people actually tasked with fixing the problem, the ones facing the problems head on, don’t care. It’s probably an unfair analogy to compare the Internet Explorer team to the disaster response team at BP (though I’m doing it anyway), but you can’t deny the similarities: what the teams have been able to accomplish to this point may seem like a classic case of too little too late, but when taken in the context of the challenges that needed to be surmounted, the progress really has been truly impressive.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m not an expert on oil disaster recovery. It’s overly audacious to call myself a web standards expert, too, but I’d dare say I qualify in most senses as a web technologies professional, and recent developments on the Internet Explorer team have shown me that, in business like in life in general, there are two sides to every story. And that’s enough to make me think twice about how BP — the people at BP, not the faceless corporation — is handling the spill.

So the next time you turn to vilify a corporation for its misdeeds, have some courtesy, have some sympathy, and some taste. The fact is, you may not understand the problem the way they understand the problem, and in all likelihood, the real people working on fixing the problem care about it just as much as you do.