I was reviewing my blog’s spam folder. I check because occasionally a real comment gets flagged (and it happened today). I saw this one:
Greetings, There’s no doubt that your website may be having internet browser compatibility issues.
When I look at your website in Safari, it looks fine however, if opening in IE, it has some overlapping issues.
I just wanted to give you a quick heads up! Other than that, excellent
blog!
IE? Internet Exploder? How long has that spammer been using that text block?
Huh. There’s more people still using IE than I would have thought. When I check browser stats on sites where I’m an admin, I never see 9.20% for IE anymore. Not for years.
I suppose those sites simply attract smarter — or at least more privacy/security minded — folk than average.
Random Acts of Gibberish 
I see that a lot on corporate sites where admins put a “standard load” on each desktop. That’s whatever Microsoft provides, plus required application software, and everything locked down hard so that nothing can be added or modified.
The usual excuse is “we can’t be expected to support third-party software” or something along that line.
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IE (some versions) still get security updates, but Micro$qui$h stopped releasing it more than four years ago. So corporate users forced to use it, and older folks who don’t get new systems, probably do account for it.
(I tried IE when it came out in ’95. I immediately downloaded Netscape. I’ve only used IE since on mandated corporate systems, or when working on someone else’s computer for them.)
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I keep a Windows VM updated because I occasionally run into web sites that *only* work with Internet Explorer. Won’t even render the basic page on anything else. Getting to my wife’s employer’s HR site is the main one; they’ve outsourced their HR, so there’s no other way to deal with them.
The same VM also has Firefox and Chrome installed, because I regularly run into web sites which will only work with the *Windows* version of Firefox, and roll over and die with the Linux version.
Reminds me of the “your browser sucks so we’re blocking you!” browser wars of the later 1990s, when even major corporate site webmasters would carefully tune their HTML to only render on their preferred browser. Sucked if it didn’t run on your OS…
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Hey, does she work for FairPoint? Those idiots set up everything — internal HR and external cust-svc alike — to render only in Win IE. I think it was one more contributing factor in their bankruptcy.
Heck of it was, nothing in the code actually required IE that I could see. Apparently it simply looked at the browser ID field, and displayed the error message for anything else. I think I tested that by getting my browser to claim to be IE, and getting the real page.
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For what its worth, my work offers a choice of IE or Chrome. Not that I do much on said computers, but its there.
I have IE installed on my personal desktop, but about the only time I use it so to troubleshoot problems with how something is working.
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