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IE Standardization Fading Fast
alphadogg writes "Just as Internet users in general have defected in huge numbers from Microsoft Internet Explorer over the past several years, the business world, as well, is becoming less dependent on the venerable browser. Companies that used to mandate the use of IE for access to web resources are beginning to embrace a far more heterodox attitude toward web browsers. While it hasn't gone away, the experience of having to use IE 6 to access some legacy in-house web app is becoming less common. 'A lot of it has to do with the emergence of the modern web and the popularity of mobile. They have made it very different for companies to truly standardize on a browser,' says Gartner Research analyst David Mitchell Smith."
My favorite example of a web-app developer who knew virtually nothing about HTML but shipped what "worked" had every single element on the page absolute-positioned with CSS. What looked like a simple table of 30 rows of data on the screen was actually hundreds of DIVs that had been rendered on the fly by the server with absolute position coordinates for each one. Even INPUT elements that were invisible had absolute positions calculated for them. Every time someone loaded a page, the server would calculate the offset for each "cell" in the table so it would look like a table, and for dozens of invisible form elements so they wouldn't collide with the table. The billion-dollar non-tech company that bought this couldn't figure out why the server frequently became unresponsive... They actually bought a second server from the developer and a load balancer to get around the fact that the developer didn't understand basic HTML, and have been using the app for 7 years. When I explained the problem to them, they reasoned that it would cost them more to ask the developer to do it properly that to just add additional servers as needed. They will probably be using it for the next 20 years. And the login page states that it requires IE.
Wow, I hope they did not pay you for the explanation because your description of the problem and your resolution is way off base. While I can't speak about the quality of code that was provided to this company. I can tell you that crappy HTML/CSS layouts that renders slowly in the browser has no impact on the server. This is because HTML/CSS is rendered on the client system NOT the server. Yeap, that's right, your browser is responsible for how the page looks, and that is handled by resources on your pc. Maybe what is happening here, and what I think is more plausible using your explanation of the issue, is that the data that is being served to the browser is a result from a database query served up by a server side script and it is the query that is slow and thus, needing an additional server with load balancing.