Why the best web hackers hate Microsoft

The best web developer have the most reasons to hate IE and Microsoft. They pay the highest productivity tax.

For scaling, it’s been pointed out that it’s normal for the database to be the bottleneck after you add a cluster of web servers. If you take out the bottleneck of model and controllers, you end up spending most of your development time in the view.

So the most productive programmers end up spending a higher percentage of their time dealing with view issues. And that, inevitably, means having to deal with cross-browser compatibility issues. Although there are standards for how certain code is supposed to display on a browser, there is no reliable way to ensure it works asides from actually trying it in each one.

When things don’t look good in all browsers, it’s usually Internet Explorer that is not behaving properly. We try something, test it again in all browsers. Rinse and repeat.

This is what I call the Microsoft productivity tax. The faster you are at writing web apps, and the more unusual the project, the higher the tax.

So, a word to all my tech friends that work on non-web projects: Piss Off. My hatred of Microsoft isn’t some knee-jerk commie thing. Think about how you would feel if for a couple weeks a year you wasted time on cross-browser issues, mainly working around MSIE inadequacies.