I’m know I’m not the only one to raise issue with the fact that Internet Explorer is a terrible browser. It’s an often and well lamented fact that it flat-out sucks. Lack of standards support, too much propietary add-on nonsense and being much too open to security holes.
My beef with IE is quite simple. First off, it’s really bad handling of CSS. This site is full CSS only which is fine, except when you try and get the site to look the same in every browser. For the most part, it does. Except recently. When I added the blog, the content pages started to get really long, and after a while I was ending up with a big long page of text in the middle and nothing in the columns left and right. So I figured I’d add a very simple 1px line down the left handside, to tighten up the text. Works fine in Firefox, but not in IE. Grr.
Second bit of beef. Lack of transparency/PNG support. I wanted to add a simple graphic to the top “banner” bar. Very simple, a faded graphic, that starts transparent and blends out to white. It look great in FF, but not in IE. I end up with a grey box. Even the small graphic on the bottom of the banner bar doesn’t look like it should. Typical.
The solution? Yeh, all sorts, there’s always a solution. But only with hacks. For example, you can write browser specific code, either special CSS for different browsers, or only show the fancy stuff to browsers that support it. For PNG support, you can employ another hack which blends a transparent gif behind all images using Javascript so the transparency works. Fairly simple to employ, but a hack nevertheless.
With more and more varied configurations of computer users nowadays, the job of the webmaster is a tough one. Why must we be forced to use all these hacks just to make the site look the same in the web’s most popular browser? Or do you go on the offensive, think sod it, and write a standards compliant site, that looks shite in IE and alienate the majority of your visitors? Tricky one.