This isn’t an April Fools post. IE really does suck, and continue to suck. Sure, they’ve improved some things and broken some new things. IE continues to lag behind every other browser.
A co-worker sent the site below a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to post it on here. The site gives a ton of examples of how IE does things wrong and differently than the rest of the pack.
Time and time again, nothing beats testing in true environments: in the case of a Windows browser, that means us Mac users must possess multiple OS’s running multiple versions of the web browsers from Parallels, VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox. Faking it any other way is only asking for trouble. I’ve experienced it time and time again.
Here’s another article that supports that, this time using IE9′s browser modes.
The Dangers of Cross-Browser Testing with IE9′s Browser Modes
We do tend to give Internet Explorer a bad rap. OK, it totally deserves it. But it’s interesting to read a little bit of the history of the earlier versions of IE. I don’t really recall IE from that time period. I was completely focused on Netscape and Mosaic before that.
I really had no idea that so much of today’s web development landscape had its foundations in Micrsoft’s web browser.
Co-worker shared this with the company yesterday, and I just ran out of time to post it. I love the idea of making others aware of their out-of-date software — it’s one thing if there were a cost involved, but most people just aren’t updating their computers. It leaves them vulnerable to security exploits and is dumbing down their web experience:
A co-worker sent this site to me last week. It’s basically a way to get some CSS3 properties working in older versions of Internet Explorer (6-9) via an .htc file.
We spend a lot of time placating Internet Explorer. But with time, we even can wrangle in IE to play [fairly] nice. A lot of the issues with IE, you’ll start to recognize over and over (Double margins anyone?).
This is a great rundown of the common IE bugs and various ways to squash them. I prefer using conditional commented style sheets whenever possible so as not to bloat my main style sheet with hacks and IE fixes.
I tweeted this at the beginning of November, but felt it was worth reposting and subsequently retweeting. Smashing Magazine did a great article on continued support of older browsers. While not all web projects require this same amount of time and effort to make work in IE6, there is definitely more labor involved — often with a degraded and sub-standard result, not to mention slight code bloat to fix things like IE6′s lack of PNG transparency and conditional style sheets.
While I don’t take as hard of a line as the Smashing Magazine article, it does make a very valid point — stop giving away stuff for free and see how quickly clients move away from the “need” category when it comes to older browsers.
I feel like half the posts on here recently have been linking to Smashing Magazine. They’ve just continued to write relevant and great articles and lists that speak to me.
This particular list is all about JavaScript and jQuery. I particularly like the first one — “Respond.js: Fast CSS3 Media Queries for Internet Explorer 6-8 and More.” Oh IE. Why do you still exist?
Just a heads up based on my recent experience — there are a lot of writeups on HTML5, with a lot of of them suggesting that a simple set of javaScript document.createElement like the ones in the example below are all you need to use the new HTML5 tags in older browsers that don’t know what the heck HTML5 is. Well, while the document.createElement does in fact keep the browsers from choking on the tags, I’ve found getting styling of anchor tags within a nav tag is problematic in a set of browsers. You’ll never guess which ones: Internet Explorer. I’ve now experience on two separate projects IE’s inability to process the CSS of something along the lines of:
nav a {color:#ccc; text-decoration:none;}
So I’m back to having a more traditional nav that utilizes a div with “nav” as the id or class name:
<div id="nav">
</div>
It just doesn’t work in older IE versions. Yet another reason to use Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or basically anything modern. If you’re still foolishly using IE, at least use the latest (though that hasn’t been without its problems in my experience either!)
document.createElement('header');
document.createElement('nav');
document.createElement('section');
document.createElement('article');
document.createElement('aside');
document.createElement('footer');
Regardless, while all browsers can’t be cutting edge and support every feature and standard, at least Google, Mozilla, Apple, etc. try to. IE just plays catch up.
All web designers and web developers have one time or another (or much much much more often) banged their head against the wall, building a wonderful CSS layout-based design that works wonderfully in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc, but then completely barfs in older Internet Explorer browsers on the PC. Most who have to deal with browser compatibility on a regular basis expect and can preemptively react to IE, but fewer understand why IE’s weirdness gets triggered in some occasions but not others. The article below gives a wonderful background, analysis and explanation on the nitty gritty.
