If you tell me to stop using IE ...

Posted on 30 September 2010 by Pete Duncanson Tweet

The most common answer to any Internet Explorer related problem appears to be "you should stop using it". Here's a few reasons why the next person to say this to me gets a punch in the face.

As fellow designers, I'm sure you can all sympathise with having to work on sites and check in the various versions of Internet Explorer. I don't mind it per-se, I hate that there are no decent debugging tools available so I can see a problem but I've nothing to help me fix it.

Anyway, I posted a question on Twitter this morning about a very very very very specific bug that had cropped up where you can't select an input or dropdown on a form in IE7.

No logical reason for it (other than the eventual fix of putting it in an extra conditional div with a position:relative .... obviously)

However, one of the answers I got back to my question was from a good friend@rossbrown saying "Not using IE" fixes many IE crimes."

Jokes aside, a punch in the face awaits

Now I know Ross was joking but this is a suprisingly common and epically unhelpful response given to many IE questions. Ross will be permitted to survive such a response but the next person to answer any IE related question in this manner will receive a punch in the face.

Why the sense of humour failure?

• Lets face it, the majority of the online world still use one of the many versions of IE so you have to test for it.
• Our particular client uses it inhouse so every problem and bug discovered is visible to them at all times, your client is likely to be the same.
• Even looking back at IE7 and IE6, they're still supported by Microsoft and considered A Grade browsers by Yahoo.
• It's just not funny when you've spent two hours trying to figure out exactly what the problem is let alone what sort of limited toolkit you've got available to debug and fix it. (IE developer toolbar I'm looking at you).

So, I hope this helps you to spare a thought for anguished designers, developers and producers and basically everyone who do support the browser that's by far and away the most popular on users machines worldwide.

Thinking about IE6 support,  I had some thoughts on that too.

Please do me a favour and retweet this, it just might spare a budding comedian a punch in the face!