The plight of Internet Explorer. It’s a joke that’s long worn out its welcome. Well, almost. Developers who have to deal with the idiosyncrasies of ancient versions of the browser would still prefer Microsoft to give up on the maligned piece of software, going by a recently-deleted top post on its official suggestions forum.
Based on a screenshot taken by VentureBeat’s Emil Protalinski, the narky suggestion had amassed over 6700 votes (original, but now broken link) before being purged, beating out SVG animation support and auto-updates for older versions of IE, with 6570 and 2927 votes respectively.
As hilarious and seeming beneficial as the suggestion may sound, as a developer by the name of “Vladimr” pointed out, leaving Internet Explorer to rot would result in a Internet Explorer 6-like scenario in 5-10 years’ time, except it’d be an abandoned IE 11 web designers would be wrestling with.
As great the strides the browser has taken over the years are, a half-decade from now it’ll be a creaky tub of security issues and poor standards compliance. A more reasonable idea, which does appear on the same forum, is that Microsoft adopts an open source rendering engine for IE, such as Gecko, WebKit or Blink.