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Internet Explorer

Bye-bye peekaboo bug!

Software

My new site unfortunately suffered from the infamous IE6 peekaboo bug accompanied by some messed up float clearings, but these problems now seem to be a thing of the past having discovered the proper fix (at least in my case). Simply add display: inline-block to the layer containing the float! One line of CSS and everything works a lot better in Internet Explorer! (or, in my case, IEs4Linux through Wine)

Hurray for progress!

(Edit: somewhat. Looks like I will need to provide a smallish hack to only let MSIE6 read that code as other browsers don't like it.)

Giving up on MSIE6

Software

Soon I will be making a bold decision: I'm going to stop trying to make my new web sites work in Internet Explorer 6.

First of all, Internet Explorer 7 is a huge improvement. No serious hacks but only a few tweaks and workarounds were necessary to get my designs working in it. Believe it or not, a single static CSS file now actually gives me exactly what I want under all of MSIE7, Firefox , Opera and Safari/Konqueror. MSIE6 has really become the ugly duckling on the web and now that even Microsoft has a somewhat reasonable browser, even Redmond fanboys can escape its CSS horrors.

Also, Microsoft is doing everything it can to get a larger install base for MSIE7. MSIE6 has dropped from nearly 100% (amongst IE users) to 65% in the first few months. This puts the overall market share of MSIE6 under 50% - and falling with every use of Windows Update or Vista install. Consider how MSIE5.5 is already below 1% in market share and it's not a bad assumption something similar will happen to MSIE6 in a year time. And why spend time on getting things to work with obsolete software? This is 2007, where updating software is infinitely easier than it was in 1996 when 14k4 modems roamed the world.

So this is where I draw the line. Bye MSIE6.

Still angry with MSIE

Software

It's been a (short) while since I've filed a complaint about the dead parrot called Microsoft Internet Explorer, so here I go again:

It is extremely frustrating when a piece of craftmanship (in this case Javascript code) conforms to all known standards in the solar system and then MSIE says "nuh-uh, I have my own rules so your standards-compliant crap is not going to work". Trying to do some magic with insertRow on a TableElement? Tough luck: both MSIE/6 and MSIE/7 will fail.

Maybe I should start writing pages in plain text.

Design failure by design

Software

Earlier this week I was a happy man. I've been working on a new web site and everything worked as expected. The Javascript/AJAX form updates worked wonderfully. The CSS stylesheet rendered exactly the same in every major browser I could get my hands on (Firefox, IE6, IE7, Safari, Konqueror). Life was good.

So what happens the very first time I show the page to a random friend? Yes, indeed, you guessed right. The design looks like crap.

I seriously wish I could just tell potential users of the site to get a recent, decent browser.. but the site targets a large audience so marketshare cannot be ignored. So it's back to the drawing board and back to endless testing to ensure even older Microsoft products render the site a-okay.

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Tom has more friends but mine are prettier! (#1/1)