Hate …
I don’t use the word hate too often. I was taught that it was a bad word, and that there was nothing anyone could do to me that should make me hate them. Sure I dislike certain politicians, but I refrain from using the word hate when I talk about them (most of the time).
However, there is one piece of software out there that I hate beyond words (and I don’t feel guilty about since it is not a person). I am finishing up the new design for the homepages on smugmug, along with several other ‘really cool things’™ – until Don noticed a layout bug in Internet Explorer. I pretty much knew what it was and how I would have to fix it and I spent the next hour going through the site verifying that the new CSS worked. It worked perfectly, but another bug had appeared. And this bug was unlike any other bug I had ever seen.
There were two elements on the page; a paragraph and an H3 tag that loaded invisible. They would appear when you resized the window or scrolled down, but would quickly dissapear when you moused over an image. Since the problem was only in two spots (that were not the same), and the page shared a lot of the same general mark up I was puzzled. I thought maybe I missed closing something so I started to remove all unecessary code piece by piece until I got down to just this:
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
.miniBox {
float: left;
}
.box {
background-color: gray;
}
.spacer {
clear: both;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="box">
<div>
<h3>title</h3>
</div>
<div>
<div class="miniBox">subject</div>
</div>
<div class="spacer"></div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Go ahead and check it out, you will see that the title line will not appear. I did not know what to do at that point, it was so bizarre that I was unsure anyone would know how to fix it, and I wanted to cry since the new homepage had worked out so well up to that point (and the fact that it was again 2am). But one google search later and I found my answer: ‘position: relative’. So I grudgingly added one more line of code devoted to IE in our CSS file and fixed the problem.
The above describes a very typical problem with IE; a hair pulling, 2am, deadline looming, bloody murder type of problem. Some of these problems are well documented and you can avoid or fix them very easily, but there are still others that no one has solutions for. But back to my hatred for IE. How can a company that grosses 1 billion dollars a month not have the resources to fix a product that is in obvious need of help? The reason … they don’t care anymore. They have their strangle hold on the market with business’ that have web apps that will only run in IE (my Allstate Insurance rep showed me another one today), and that means more sales of Windows (plus Office) and more revenue for them – simple greed. Don’t get me wrong, I want smugmug to be successfull too. But there is a huge line between success and greed, and MS crossed it a long time ago. I hate IE because it represents that greed. MS literally killed Netscape to get where they are, and now they don’t care.
True, I am happier now that smugmug dropped support for all verions of IE5 and below – but there appears to be no relief in site since IE7 does not look to be anything more than another glorified security update. Most of the IE devs sound like they are on a time crunch to get the new version out the door and we’ll be lucky if they fix anything at all. But what the hell have they been doing the last 5 years? I do get to take time off at smugmug and have some weeks that are less productive than others, but 5 years of nothing? Oh well, that is it about my hatred for IE. I just wanted to document this important fix so others may find it and they won’t have the same experience I had.
September 1st, 2005 at 11:09 pm
You’re right; bugs like these are a pain. I can’t promise all CSS bugs will be fixed in IE7, but many have been. Your sample renders fine for me in the IE7 Beta 2 build I’m running. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx for some info on how the IE team is paying attention now and trying to put and end to these CSS hacks. You can e-mail me (joshuaa at m….com) if you’d like me to make sure you’re signed up to get the CSS-fix beta of IE7 when it’s delivered.
September 15th, 2005 at 4:40 am
Yeah – go read that blog listed by Joshua. Amazing what a little competition from a ~decent~ browser (Firefox) will do to Microsoft’s attitude (especially when the competition starts to gain general market acceptance). While any IE improvements are welcome, it is completely unforgivable that a company with the resources of Microsoft will leave unfixed so many known CSS bugs. In that blog, the Microsoft IE Web Standards Project manager acknowledges a huge number of known CSS bugs in IE, yet he admits to allocating resources to fix only a few of the most egregious in IE7. Not Joshua’s fault certainly, but his Microsoft managers who control the purse strings and decide which projects to/not staff are breeding the contempt towards Microsoft that is becoming so prevalent (Exhibit A: JT’s original “hate” posting here). This is not an irrational/jealous/unjustified “I hate Microsoft because they are big and successful” sort of hate – rather it is a “I hate Microsoft because their software is sh*tty and they admit that they know it is sh*tty and they don’t care enough to provide resources to fix it even though they have all the money in the world” sort of hate. Jimmy calls it greed – I call it arrogance. Just because the security holes in IE are higher on the list than CSS bugs does not nullify that fact that IE is a terrible product. At least with IE improvements, Microsoft is being reluctantly dragged along by irate and alienated users, rather than leading with quality and innovation as the dominant market player should. I am truly shocked that someone like Joshua is reading blogs like this – maybe there is hope for Microsoft after all.
November 6th, 2005 at 12:56 pm
One site that requires IE — totally blowing my mind — is the one for the online security scan at SYMANTEC, of all places.
security.symantec.com
January 12th, 2006 at 11:24 pm
I was just reading some of the blogs as I decide which one of these days I’ll have enough time to switch over all of my photos to smugmug. Yes, it’s just a matter of time. I’ve been searching for a product/service like yours for a year now. But I’m going to have to have enough time to play with it a week and find all the limitation and see if any are insurmountable.
Anywho, I ran across this rant on MS. Wholly justifible rant, I might add. Back in “plug and play” was going to change the world, I fought with a very popular Adaptec SCSI card being recognized in Windows95. I dumped 95 and went back to 3.1.
But a lot of the aloofness problems of MS come from us, the consumers. 90% of them don’t care about these things. And it comes from people’s daily lives and habits. People just generally don’t care about the details of anything. Once you start getting into the inner workings, people just don’t care.
My business involves me closely with cars. And the same rant about MS can be said about cars. The modern day Honda Accord is a piece of plastic junk compared to the ones from 10 years ago. The Honda products in any other part of the world are superior to ours in design, features, and manufacture.
Why did they change and cheapen out? Because they could. Because people didn’t care. And even now, only a small handful do. The same can be said about MS and the software industry. If things need to change, it has to start with us. The companies only can be run this way because we allow it.