It seems google developers have been having major problems getting their new Google Wave web collaboration software to run in IE. Ignoring all the possible business motives , I’d just like to make a few comments about the actual technicalities of this.
Firstly any web developer worth their weight will know that Internet Explorer is indeed a frustrating platform to accommodate. IE does not support web standards in the same way as most other browsers and behaves very differently with each version. IE8 is better at consistently interpreting web pages and javascript but it is still not perfect (then again neither is any other particular browser IMO). However regardless of these inconsistencies web developers should still support IE to a certain extent as it is still one of the most widely used platforms for web browsing.
What makes me confused about Google’s admission they are finding IE support difficult is the fact that their own web development platforms for user interfaces, GWT and GWT-Ext, are relatively well supportive of IE. There are still bugs present when using many of the layout combinations, but I’ve worked with GWT-Ext for long enough to know that these are not insurmountable by a few CSS based bug fixes. And if I can resolve these problems I’m certain there are plenty of much cleverer individuals at Google who also can.
I know that Google Wave is not necessarily developed from the GWT/GWT-Ext framework, but regardless of the way they have developed it I find it hard to believe they cannot support IE directly.
The fix seems to be some kind of add-on to IE to make it support Google Wave which seems to me a counter-productive step. If you start treating one target platform very differently from the rest, surely you’re setting yourself up for further cross-compatibility problems down the line?
So it seems that in fact the IE add-on essentially allows IE to interpret pages in the same way Chrome does. While my original speculation about its operation was wrong, nevertheless my suspicion the ‘fix’ was a bad idea seems to be correct – instead of treating one target platform very differently they are essentially opting to doctor it so they can ignore its quirks. In my opinion this entirely misses the point that different users may have very different browsers, and they should all to an extent be supported. What’s the difference between enforcing a user installs a fix that makes IE behave like Chrome, and enforcing that they install Chrome itself? The answer is very little.