briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: Internet Explorer)

Internet Explorer 8 Review

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:35:52 -0700

I installed Internet Explorer 8 today. I need it to test the websites at work. I couldn't care less if my personal sites render properly in IE at this point, but I must accommodate people at work.

I should mention right off the bat that given the way Microsoft takes a dump all over web standards and the hours and hours of grief as a web developer trying to get sites to look proper in IE6, unless IE8 crapped gold nuggets every time I clicked a link I don't think I'd like it.

Installing

I wasn't disappointed. IE8 is hate-worthy. A steaming pile of offal. First there was the joy of trying to install it.

Why does installing a web browser require checking my computer for "malicious software"? Why can't I opt out of this? In any case I didn't have to worry about it, because the first time I tried the install, it bombed before it got that far, and demanded that I go to the Windows Update site and install some patch for IE7 before I could continue. Note: I don't have IE7 on my computer. This is a work machine that I kept IE6 on for testing our company websites. This blew my mind.

So I tried to download this patch for IE7, but I couldn't, because I had to get Windows Genuine disAdvantage first. Rage filled me at this point to the point of overflowing. If it was my home computer I'd have stopped right there. But I need this garbage for work, so I held my nose and did it.

Of course the patch required a reboot. Reboot #1.

Now I was able to continue with the install. A slow, plodding download; I think it took 5-10 minutes to do its thing, but it's hard to tell. There was no progress bar to show me how far along it was, nothing to tell me the elapsed time, no indication how large the files were that were being fetched. There is something resembling a progress bar, but it doesn't actually show you much in the way of "progress". Instead a little green thing bounces around like the car from Knight Rider. How much cocaine do you need to imbibe to invent a GUI like this?

Of course IE8 itself required a reboot. Reboot #2.

Why? Installing Firefox and Opera don't require reboots. They download as self-contained .exe installer files. I run them and software appears. This is 2009, for the love of God. Maybe in 20 more years Microsoft will finally manage to re-invent emerge or apt.

The IE8 install, including patching and reboots, took me 45 minutes. If I had to do this on more than one machine, I'd probably jump out the window. How much time have you sucked out of my life, Microsoft? To compare, I decided to install Opera. Opera took less than one minute to download AND install and didn't require a reboot.

Features

When you first open it up, it sends you through a wizard and asks you if you want to enable a bunch of crap. I said no to everything. What the hell is an "Accelerator"? I assumed it was something that tried to make web pages load faster, like the download accelerator scams you used to get popups for all the time in 2001. So I said no.

Turns out "Accelerators" are plugins. Why didn't they call them Plugins? Did some marketroid decide "plugin" wasn't EXTREME enough, so decided to make up their own word? Why do I have to relearn the English language every time someone releases new software? Not Invented Here syndrome?

Windows tried to default me to Live Search, but I give it credit for being upfront in allowing me to turn that crap off and use Google. (No doubt thanks to US anti-trust court proceedings.) 473 wizard dialogs later I had a browser.

The next thing I noticed is more lame attempts to push more Microsoft services at me. In the URL bar every time you type anything, you see this:

Awesome. Is there any way to remove this spamvertisement other than installing Windows Search? If I planned to use IE8, which I don't, I imagine I'd inevitably click that by accident, which is probably the whole idea.

IE8 also added a bunch of useless garbage to my bookmarks toolbar which I insta-deleted. Or tried to. My favorite feature of IE8 by far is this one:

Apparently deleting things from the bookmarks toolbar is just too much for a modern 4-core CPU to handle. Congrats Microsoft. Hang, crash, boom.

There is no menu in IE8 by default. No wait, there is a menu. It's just in the wrong place (lower right side of the top browser area), and instead of readable text it's mostly unlabeled buttons with tiny arrows next to it.

It's like a traditional menu and a fun mystery novel combined! What is in the dropdown next to the house? I'm sure it's a fun surprise.

And actually you can get the old menu to appear too, if you press Alt. Insanity. But it doesn't appear at the top, it appears under the URL bar. One of the few arguably good things about Windows is that programs have consistent GUI parts and work the same way: they have a menu at the top, it's always in the same one place, there's a File and an Edit, and it's predictable. Thanks Microsoft for getting even that wrong.

When I highlight text on a web page, a little blue thing appears that I think I'm supposed to click on. The icon is a bunch of lines and squiggles and an arrow or something. There's no indication what that thing actually does. I clicked it out of curiosity and get a menu full of a bunch of random options like "Search for this". I think this is where ACCELERATORS are supposed to pop up, or something, who cares?

Fonts in IE8 look fuzzy. As a bonus, after installing IE8, fonts in a bunch of other programs (Outlook) are fuzzy now too. Hurrah! IE8, like its predecessors, apparently extends its tendrils into every nook and cranny of your system, corrupting and perverting as it goes. Maybe that's why it needed to reboot my computer twice to install it.

IE8 comes with a Firebug ripoff, which is better than View Source invoking Notepad, but took a full 2 minutes to load when I tried to open it the first time.

IE8 does render my blog properly, which is good. IE7 does too, I think, I only tested it once. I'm not losing sleep over it. Thank you Firefox and Opera: if you didn't exist and put the pressure on, we'd all still be using IE6 and I'd still be writing all my web pages twice to make sure they work in Internet Excrementplorer. As much as I detest IE, if people migrate to IE8 from the shard of utmost evil that is IE6, I'll be happy.

Line wrapping pre tags

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:38:50 -0800

For a long time my blog layout has been a bit screwy; it had a hard minimum width for the central column of the layout, which caused an annoying need for horizontal scrolling after you make your browser window small enough horizontally. Nothing in my CSS was causing this as far as I could tell.

Turns out it was the PRE tags that I put my code snippits in. They weren't line-wrapping. I found a page with some CSS to make PRE tags line-wrap and now my site looks better in narrow windows in Firefox, Opera and Konqueror.

Turns out it doesn't work in IE7. Of course. But if you're using IE7, my site looking odd is the least of your problems. Also I didn't test it in IE6, and I don't really care what it looks like in IE6. IE6 is already dead and buried, in my eyes.

Ouch

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 01:01:22 -0800

Looks like someone writing the Ruby documentation for REXML was cranky. Though I do appreciate IE-bashing in all its forms.

Opera theme chooser

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 00:48:44 -0700

Previously I blabbered about how writing themes for Firefox sucks.

Now, on a related note: why is the Opera theme browser so much superior to Firefox?

Observe Opera:

In Opera the theme browser opens in a window in the application itself. You browse some themes. You pick one and click Download and it downloads right in the window there. It applies (without restarting the browser, note) and asks if you like it. If you don't, then it reverts back to the original theme.

Changing between already-installed themes involves a SINGLE CLICK in the themes dialog. You click a theme name and it applies instantly. That's it.

Observe Firefox:

When browsing/applying themes, Firefox opens up this window. Clicking the obscure "Get More Themes" text link takes you to an external URL, https://addons.mozilla.org, in my opinion one of the worst-designed theme sites I've ever seen. There, you get to browse through text links of themes on the main page (without thumbnails). Sometimes thumbnails appear on the secondary individual theme pages, and sometimes not; but not a thumbnail in sight on the main page. This means to visually browse themes (judging by, you know, what they look like rather than their name and version number), you have to click about a hundred times on all the theme links.

Once you find a theme you like, you can click the "Install Now" link on that page, in which case a dialog box appears asking if you want to install a theme from this JAR file:

Now, why in the world does it do this? I'm a borderline-OCD computer-programming geek-monster and even I don't give a crap about the URL of the JAR file I'm installing a theme from. One reason for this is that after downloading a theme JAR file, I have no idea what to do with it to get Firefox to import it. It used to be that you had to run a special page with some Javascript triggers that would import a local JAR theme file into Firefox. Then I read that you can drag-and-drop a JAR file into Firefox to install it, but this never worked in Linux and I never tried again. I don't want to screw around with this crap. I want Firefox to load the theme.

Anyways. Clicking OK to install the JAR file makes the theme magically appear in the original (separate) Themes dialog I posted a screenshot of above. And then, to try the theme, you double-click it or click Use Theme, and THEN you have to restart your browser. And if you don't like the theme, you have to restart your browser AGAIN to change the theme back.

Firefox used to let you update your theme without a browser restart. This was years ago, but I remember it. And it never worked right. Sometimes parts of the interface would change and parts wouldn't. And you'd have to restart the browser to fix it (or to discover that the theme just hosed your Firefox profile and you need to wipe it and start fresh).

Firefox got this wrong in pretty much every way. I just tested Firefox Beta2, and other than combining the Themes and Extensions windows into one window, and moving some buttons in the Themes window around, it looks exactly the same. Bad bad bad.

(IE has no themes. So it still sucks worse than both. apply "IE_Sucks" tag)

A sad, sad day

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 20:37:21 -0700

I spent the time to get this site to work in Internet Explorer. It still works in Firefox and Opera of course, and that's the extent to which I'm going to bother testing. (Well, OK, here's a screenshot of my site in lynx. Still looks great to me!) I also added some color, because all the grey and the lack of contrast was causing permanent damage to my nervous system. It's pretty bad when bright orange makes your site look BETTER.

I ended up going to a table-based layout. I know it's The Wrong Way™ to do things. But in my opinion, CSS can't handle column-based layouts worth crap. I learned today that there are actually tags in CSS to support a multi-column layout. But I know IE doesn't support them, if any other browser does. Who knows.

Getting three columns, one of which is resizable, and all of which are the SAME HEIGHT, without using tables, is like trying to program HTML with 9 broken fingers while a rabid monkey attacks your face. Cheap hacks with floats or position:absolute is not my idea of an elegant approach to web design, when a simple full-site wrapper table does it exactly right. Use a table to split the site up into sectors of specific size and orientation and alignment, and then CSS your brians out, that's what I say.

IE-b0rker returns

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 22:27:55 -0700

Now complete with large annoying red border. Here's a screenshot of Opera pretending to be IE.

I'm using this code to detect IE browsers:

<?php if(strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"MSIE")) { ?>

If anyone knows a better way, I'd love to hear it.

Cow

Sun, 14 May 2006 13:20:50 -0700

A fit of inspiration struck me today, and I whipped up this layout. You can't go wrong with cow-based layouts.

EDIT: As usual, I'm not bothering to test this in Internet Explorer. Seeing as it uses transparent .pngs, I already know it will be b0rked in IE. Tough crap!

ExplorerDestroyer

Mon, 08 May 2006 18:12:21 -0700

As anti-advertising as I usually am, I think that ExplorerDestroyer is for a very good cause. Anything that gets people to stop using IE is my friend. Also this looks nicer than the script I was using.

IE-b0rker script

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 09:24:04 -0700

A couple people asked me why the code that causes my web site to display a large nagging screen to IE-users now doesn't quite cover the whole screen, but only a good portion of it. This is so IE-users can see that there is a website underneath of there, but not see enough to actually get any USE out of the website. So it's not broken, it was deliberate.