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.
Happiness Is Valuable, Too
Even setting aside that admittedly rickety fiscal argument, I’m not aware of any single piece of software that’s made Web designers unhappier than Internet Explorer. Most everyone I know just simply loathes it, and if they don’t, they lament the extra effort they need to expend in ensuring I.E. compatibility, time that could have been spent on positive endeavours.
Many of the hours I’ve spent wrangling with Internet Explorer were squarely unbillable, I admit, but it was my personal time that I was investing in making some side project work competently in I.E. It’s time that I should have been enjoying, not time I should have been spending gnashing my teeth together in frustration. Software cost can be quantified in dollars, but it should also be measured in human impact; its design matters.
And now, I’m going to start looking at how just much Internet Explorer 7 is going to cost me.
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