Canblog

I have an ongoing battle with my development team.  Like all good techies, they are snobs about technology, extremely opinionated, and not always the most sympathetic to the average user.

We all use Firefox in the office and it's pretty easy to forget something: Statistics about browser usage seem to indicate that Internet Explorer for Windows still has about 85% of all users.

When they proudly came to me with the first working version of the product we're building, the first question out of my mouth was: Does it work in IE?

The answer was, of course: I don't know, because IE sucks and I refuse to use it.

I patiently explained, with increasing frustration, that if they ever gave me that answer again, I would throw them out a window.  A web based product which aspires to be a commercial success simply needs to work in IE.  I don't care about IE's lack of standards compliance, its refusal to handle transparent PNG's or any other such crap.  Test EVERYTHING you do in IE before you talk to me.  Otherwise, you're working on a research project, not software.

Guess what?  My own web site doesn't work in IE!!!  I never tested the monkeying around that I did with the stylesheets in Movable Type.  I got addicted to a little bookmarklet for Firefox that I found that lets me do stylesheet tweaks live.  So I'd move a pixel, add an element, and boom: Firefox would reload the page.  When I got something that I liked, I just uploaded it and never tested it!  The templates I was basing my edits on worked in both browsers, and I'm no CSS expert, so I just figured that the tiny tweaks I was doing were no big deal.

Now I feel like a developer :-)... Man, IE Sucks... I can't believe anybody uses that piece of garbage :-)... Good thing nobody reads this, but apologies to anyone who may have happened upon this blog using IE.  I'm a dummy and I'm IEating crow.