IE Rant
Posted : Sunday September 6th, 2009

I wish I could think of a better (read: more humour) title for this post but I'm tired and frustrated so I can't.

IE 7 is an abomination and I really, really don't get it. I wish that it was just the IE 7 wrapper around the IE 6 rendering engine, that would have been far better and that's saying something. Yes IE 6 is not close to CSS and DOM standards but at least it was close to IE 5. And IE 8 gets credit for being "close enough" to the standards to actually work with the same code that works on Firefox, Opera and Safari.

But no. Instead we have a totally different set of very quirky behaviour that's not like 6 or 8 either. What in the .... ?!?

Now some might say well 6 isn't the standard either (or for that matter 8) and yeah okay. But what excuse was there to develop a browser that is (a) incompatible with your previous and (b) isn't the standard either? None. That's what. And that's the mystery here.

Honestly if Microsoft's different IE versions weren't so bloody difficult to test I probably wouldn't be so frustrated. But they are so it's relatively painful to test and to top it off, as pointed out, for some very stupid reason you need to test each version independently because apparently nobody at Microsoft would know "backward compatibility" if it jumped up and smacked them in the face. Oh and that "Compatibility View" in IE 8. Well. Yeah. Whatever it actually does, and I've heard various theories about that, it's certainly not either IE 6 or 7 behaviour. And it doesn't seem to really match IE 5 either. So who knows what that is supposed to be but suffice to say it doesn't really work either. What a shock.

Tags

IE  rant 

Categories

Internet  Personal 

Comments