angrynorth

Right, officially I hate IE, tis the bane of my life as a designer. Always has been always will be.

Does anybody know whether this outdated piece of crap has been updated to understand png alpha transparencies and render CSS correctly in this new service pack for XP?

Shocking!

Iain Young

I don't think it has

angrynorth

grr

This is really disappointing, it is restricting what can be done on the internet and increasing the size of files unnecessarily. I hate the fact I have to use a hack just to make a page look the same in IE, when it works perfect in all other browsers

ozzy

Out of interest, what sort of "design" do you do?

I ask our in-house developer about moving away from solely MS platforms and he almost fainted. We do .NET web page design from the user interface all the way to the back-end on SQL server.

He likes MS as it's the same development and testing solution all the way from design to testing, but maybe he's just being lazy.

Stefan

angrynorth

The majority of what I do is web design, but I also do motion graphics and print design.

For developing .NET and squirrels you are probably better off on Windows as it is its native environment.

But for page design / layouts / ui and initial templates I've found OSX to be a much better environment. Not only because it gives you no hassle but because you can make it how it should be (standards compliant) then work in your IE fixes after that which makes for much better pages because they work to standards first then are fixed to work in IE, if you know what I mean rather than making them for IE and then trying to get them to work in other browsers, which restricts the output

boomer

Why not do what some other sites do, but in reverse?

If a user is connecting via Internet Exploder, display a message to say that they can't come in unless they get themselves a decent, standards based, browser

When enough sites do this, maybe Uncle Bill will start to listen to the world, rather than expecting it to be the other way around

mb (via Firefox)

Iain Young

Surely that's just as bad as forcing people to use IE, they should be able to use what they have installed.

Personally, I think that approach to web design is not nice at all, and certainly not hat you want on a professionally produced web site. The site should look the same across all browsers without annoying the user with messages saying they're not using a decent browser.

For example, I know of some organisations that refuse to let users install 3rd party browsers other than ie bcause of the support issues involved etc (the IT departments won't let them), so you would be excluding these people from being able to access the site.

It is perfectly possible to produce code that does work across all browsers, but I agree that it is a bit painful sometimes...

That'll never happen. There's too much money involved

judgejules

Build for IE. When something works its a bonus Noone is expecting too much then, heh.

png alpha transparencies... just build it in flash. it'll work on all browsers and more people will probably be able to view it than a png with alphas

IE is your friend, dont resist the B(org)ill

J

angrynorth

In the end, I will get it the same in all browsers as per usual, but it annoys the crap out of me that I must spend an extra 10 hours on a project bug fixing in IE!

The kind of site I am building jules won't work with flash unfortunately otherwise I would be tempted to do that.

Iain Young

You don't want flash. SVG is the way to go

Chris L

I seem to recall reading something about MS stopping development of IE (the humorists amoungst you will now say 'when did they start?')? Might be wrong, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Chris

SCOSaltire

ie is great
other browsers are beta, imho

Iain Young

They're doing bug / security fixes only. I think there is a new one in development, but you'll need to get Longhorn to use it (at least that's what I heard), so it's a probably a couple of years away yet.....

Obviously someone who's never tried developing for it

Iain

DazV

I've recently changes all browsers on the LAN to Mozilla firefox with great results. Ran IE and Firefox side by side for a month, then ditched IE.

Can't understand why people like IE so much. Its pants compared to Firefox!

SJ_Skyline

Sounds like a load of w@nking off to me - if you design your site properly then it will degrade gracefully across any browser platform (IE on PC all the way down to a 3G phone) thus being accessible to all.

Forcing people to use one browser over another is arrogance to the extreme. Remember, some people are unable to download other cocktails of browser, some people are visually impaired.


- and before I get flamethrowered to death, yes - I have created some quite appaling code in my time

SCOSaltire

LOL
day in, day out

At work, we now do as Skyline says - design against specs for accessibility/standards.
Less features, but better structure.

DazV

Regarding a business environment...

I moved people over to Firefox for reasons of stability. No arrogance involved, just common sense.

SJ_Skyline

Daz,

Sorry if I was misunerstood when I said "arrogance", I meant forcing people to use one software package over another just because some guy says so, not because there was an overiding business benefit (cost saving / stability / security / etc etc)

Although on that note - A company I know with over 1000 employees went down the route of Lotus Smartsuite on the basis of the kickback the director of technical strategy got

angrynorth

Yes, thats it. We should simply accept that the worlds most popular browser is about as capable as a 3g phone at displaying modern content. We should not try to encourage people to upgrade to a standards compliant secure browser. Second best is just fine for me, so it will do for everyone else.

The visually impaired would do better to install alternative browsers as they support CSS better, which allows switchable style sheets. You need to do some research.