Difficulties with Internet Explorer
It is actually quite interesting how much you can find wrong with a browser simply by trying to do things the Right Way(tm). The browser in question is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Remember waaaaay back in the Netscape Navigator 4.x days? NN used to create the same reactions (anger, frustration and sometimes even utter confusion) with standards-oriented developers IE does today. How unfortunate the Browser War ended with the WWW being in the utter control of a company who is more concerned with gaining market share than providing a quality product.
Annoyances: IE’s box model. There arnt really standards on how to interpret standards. Of course they have to do it differently than everyone else. Its a good marketing ploy, if you already have the majority, appearing “broken” in other browsers will keep your user-base loyal.
Lack of Support: Usually involving CSS2, such as min-width, box model, lack of style support (border: dotted; comes to mind). This makes getting things to look and act the same exteremely difficult.
Utter Disregard for Innovative Technology: Internet Explorerstill does not have tabbed browsing!!1. It does not have pop-up control. It is so tightly integrated with the operating system that it is nearly impossible to uninstall/reinstall/repair.
70% of the stress at my new job is from the daily fight I maintain with IE and getting it to look the same in Firefox. Unfortunatly since its for production and over 90% of our audience uses Internet Explorer, FF is the one who suffers. Its usually from inheritance and box model inconsistencies between the two.
It is a conveniance knowing that 95% of the visitors to my personal pages are using a browser other than Internet Explorer. Of course I had developed cross-browser, cross-platform in the past, but nothing prepared me for the daily rants I bore my coworkers with about how much IE sucks.
One bright side of the park is that more and more developers are shifting towards semantic, web-standard compliant, CSS driven designs. As Internet Explorer continues to fail on a daily basis, popularity for newer more standards-compliant browsers will gain and perhaps well go back to a competitive Web where competition will drive innovation.
Luckilly Firefox is not the only browser aiming for conformance. Others include Konqueror, Opera, and, Safari.
You will find that the CSS immediate-child operator is a life saver. Basically, implement whatever hacks are necessary to get Internet Explorer to work correctly, then immediately follow with a rule utilizing this operator that undoes the mess. Consider this example:
div.TableWrapper{
width: 100%;
}
*>div.TableWrapper
{
width: auto;
}
Basically, 100% wide table elements inside of dividers whenever floating is involved cause bother browsers to fuck up in weird ways. (Basically, Internet Explorer inherits the relative width from the body element where as Gecko gets it from the immediate parent.) I cannot go into the details of how or why this hack works at the moment, but I think you get the drift.
I would also like to point out that I use this technique extensively to get PNGs with alpha channels to render under both Internet Explorer and Gecko based browsers over at
http://shadygrovevillage.org/. Check it out.