Rants Tagged with “IE”
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In today's MIX08 keynote, Microsoft showed off IE8 and there are some interesting feautres:
- AJAX related support for non-fullscreen postbacks. So that the back-forward button does what it should.
- The debugging story is interesting but seems to be FireBug# to me.
- Webslices is interesting...but again, if FF3 doesn't support it, who cares?
The beta will be available after noon PST on 3/5/2008:
http://microsoft.com/ie/ie8
I've spent the better part of the night dealing with IE6 rendering issues. I don't have a good test bed set up for testing browser problems for my personal sites so I miss major browser issues sometimes. I've been using a Visual Studio 2008 Virtual PC image to do some work with Astoria and decided to pull up my site to grab some sample code I uploaded a few weeks ago on the Entity Framework. The VS 2008 VPC is using IE6 so I brought up my site (this site) and was aghast as to how badly it looked.
Two major issues had to be addressed. The first was my use of a DOCTYPE tag on each page was forcing the pages to be rendered using the 'quirks' mode. I found this page in MSDN that helped me drop a quick script in the page to test out which rendering mode I was using. Here's that page in case someone needs it:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533687.aspx
The second issue was how I was doing some things on the site (like centering of the content, background color of divs and borders). While these worked find in IE7 and Firefox (the two I always test in), IE6 was choking and mis-handling the look of the site. In all of these cases I was able to do a web search for "ie6" and the problem and I found solutions.
If any of my readers notice that the site renders oddly for them, please e-mail me a screenshot and the URL to the page so I can address them. I am most concerned about IE5, IE5.5, Safari and Opera. If you are using these browsers, please let me know if its broken.
Is this the end of the annoying "Click on this control to activate" fiasco or just a financial deal? I hope the former...
I am using the IE7 that is installed in Vista RC1 and while the new Google Toolbar does seem to work, it is causing problems with the context menu so I uninstalled it. Interestingly I can't figure out how to tell Google its not working. Does anyone know of a feedback mechanism (e.g. connect.microsoft.com) for Google?
After hearing about Goggle's concerns about the MSN default search box in IE7, I decided to try and change the default search in IE7. I have to agree with Balmer on this one.
I was able to change the default search for the IE7 search box with 2 clicks and Google was one of more than a dozen choices. I don't see the fact that it makes MSN the default as a competitive advantage. When google let's me set the search engine to use in their Google Bar to one of their competitors search engines, i'll listen to them complain again.
I decided to download FireFox (the new 1.5 version) last week to try and combat my complains about how Flash is too pervasive. So far I am pretty impressed. Not every site that I use works well with Firefox, but the majority of my "browsing" with FireFox works flawlessly. Usually FireFox falls down when IE features are used (e.g. SharePoint or FreeTextBox related sites). I have found the following plugins to FireFox not only useful but required:
- FlashBlock: Puts a play button over every Flash animation allowing me to show Flash when I want it. Even allows me to say, "Always allow Flash from this site". I like flash when it is used right (e.g. http://gamespot.com), and hate it when it is used wrong (e.g. http://msnbc.com).
- IEView: Allows me to right-click any page and view it in Internet Explorer. Also allows me to say, "Always view in IE" so I don't have to remember to launch IE for some sites and not for others. Simply awesome.
- AdBlock: Allows you to stop ads from showing, though I am not as aggresive as some are with this block in.
I also use the Google Toolbar, but I do in IE too so I didn't list it. Overall I think FireFox is a compelling browser, though if Flashblock existed in IE I would have never switched. I don't find it any faster or better since I care about the end-user experience, and not standards compliance or anything like that.
As I do web development, I still use IE as my main browser to debug with since that is what most of my clients still have.
What do you think?
Yahoo is especially bad in that every free utility on the web is trying to install it on my machine. Usually an opt-out situation where I have to remember to uncheck the magic box. Adobe Acrobat and Shockwave now try and install it (and others). MSN Desktop search isn't much better in that is forces you to use the MSN toolbar (and I cannot even disable or hide it). I just want my google toolbar, none of the others. Arg!
In the new version of the toolbar (and desktop search) launched yesterday, you can now have intelligent tabbed browsing! Alt-Click on a link opens a new tab window. Me likey...me likey lots!
ms that the recent Patent court loss by Microsoft has some garnered some interesting support from the likes of Sun and Macromedia (Flash), among others. It is well worth a read...
