Ranting about IE again
I’ve already ranted about this damned browser. It’s cursing me. Again.
At work, I support several web sites, some intranet and extranet sites. My employer officially supports IE6. Yuck, I know. But most of the employees still use this nine year old browser. I’m on IE7 tester group, so that’s what’s on my company PC. And this just bit me. Hard.
On Monday, I received an email from the extranet user, reporting that they cannot print the web pages correctly. Yes, in business, printing can be a critical part of business. (Bleh.) I luckily isolated the problem to IE8. And the problem goes away when I use compatibility mode. And I can force this mode using a meta tag. That’s all fine and dandy. The problem is, I cannot do a proper testing of this, because we have no IE8 where I work at. And without proper testing, nothing gets rolled out to the production site. What am I to do?
Then today, I received an email from one of the intranet users, reporting a certain page is not working right since the latest update made to it. This was weird. We tested it before the update was rolled out… But this time, I find out that all testers were using IE7. The page breaks on IE6. This is so wonderful. What am I to do?
Luckily, IETester lets me tests the pages in IE5.5, 6, 7, and 8 mode. I can fix the second problem using this. Fixing first problem is also possible, but… bleh, I would be wasting so much paper for that. I’d rather use print preview to test it…
So… two things. Damn Microsoft for producing this bastard child, then marketing it so well. And damn the corporations for using these bastard technologies.
You look like have same problem with me. And web programming against those F*CK browser is sure damn hard, especially when we across something like “web standards”. Remembering my own problem around this… sigh…
It’s nice to see your rants, since I left last year. I learned so much from you over the years and though we targeted the ‘corner’ on our discussions, there was interesting talk on tech and how we get around our testing issues with IE and the ‘corner’.