geof

Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser has difficulty with many of the pages on this site. Problems can range from garbled formatting to missing content and menus. As this is my personal web site, I lack the resources and patience to check everything to see whether it triggers bugs in IE. If you are running IE, I highly recommend switching. The user experience in modern browsers is vastly improved, while Internet Explorer has been the target of numerous bugs and security problems. See browse happy for more information and for where to find free alternatives.

The problem is that technology has moved forward, but Microsoft has not significantly updated IE's capabilites in years. IE fails to conform to standards established in the 1990s and adopted nearly universally elsewhere. This may be because it is not necessarily in Microsoft's interest to help the Web become an alternative to their operating system monopoly, or because a lack of competition has not forced them to improve the software.

However, as it stands the costs to software developers and designers are huge: work can easily take twice as long as developers work around flaws in Microsoft's software. On a professional site, IE support is required; this is why I spent weeks including IE support in my annotation software. But, in developing a personal web site on a Macintosh (hence not using IE), it is difficult to justify the cost of supporting this obsolete technology. Where this is a barrier for important work (e.g. annotation), I have provided work-arounds for users of IE. Nevertheless, unless Microsoft gets with the program this site will always work better with a more modern browser. They have announced an version 7 update to IE sometime in 2006 which should improve the situation.