Web developers hate IE because historically it has been constantly behind on updates of things like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Because of this developers essentially had to make two versions of every site, one cool one to display to Firefox and more recently Chrome users (and a few users of other browsers like Opera) and one plain one to display to Internet Explorer users. As you can imagine, that makes everything way harder than it needs to be. Until IE 9 came out, IE 8 did not support HTML5 which is even to this day impeding the flow from slow, resource hogging programs like Flash Player to quicker running in-browser alternatives such as the canvas tag. Every site that uses the canvas tag has to support a fallback to Flash Player for IE 8 and below users. Believe it or not,
this is a large population of the internet. IE9 only commands
6% more of internet users. IE6 actually commands 6.3% of the population of internet users. If you add up all of the people who use outdated browsers (most of which are IE users that still use the version that shipped with their old computer), you get a significant chunk of the userbase. Other browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox have a main priority of staying up to date (both of which have a developer version that updates
daily) and even pioneering new features for browsers to make the Internet a better place. In the end, the reason people hate IE is because out of the leading three browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and IE) IE supports the least features and takes the longest to update to new, post-beta features. In reality it's a bandwagon of people who aren't web developers siding with people who actually do have a reason to dislike IE.
Sorry if that sounded like a rant, it was supposed to be informative not ranty.
