Tuesday, December 27, 2005

No defaulting to HTTP on non-standard ports

If I put in a URL like: 192.168.0.17:8023 in IE, it craps out. Stick an http:// in front of it and it works just fine.

Now, I know that ports 8023, 8042 and 8093 don't mean HTTP. However, if I use a web browser to test sites on those ports, shouldn't it at least give HTTP a try? Call me a lazy bastard (and rightly so), but I don't feel like typing in http:// every time I type in a domain with a non-standard port...

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Monday, December 26, 2005

Schneier says it sucks

See Bruce Schneier's post Internet Explorer Sucks .

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Monday, December 19, 2005

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

This one little line, which should get included at the top of the XHTML page, completely fucks IE's interpretation of CSS. Not necessarily required, so out it goes even thought everyone else plays fine with it...

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Thursday, December 15, 2005

Two words

"box model"

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Tuesday, December 13, 2005

I know Microsoft made the first version of AJAX...

...but if they can't implement half of its uses correctly they shouldn't pretend to support it.

Well, technically I guess they haven't even bothered to pretend they support the XMLHttpRequest object (unless you count their fucked up view of how you should get to XML methods from JavaScript). Since all of us have to resort to a series of if/then statements just to create one fucking object in more than one browser.

That doesn't even begin to talk about the frustration IE creates when you try to use the goddamn thing. For instance:
  1. I have an XMLHttpRequest I need to make
  2. It uses a unique token to keep track of which request has just loaded and where the response should go.
  3. Since it uses XML (and IE fucking chokes on application/xml, but I'll save that for another post), I have the XML responses getting served as text/xml.
  4. I need to copy the contents of an element (which has an xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" as it should) into the DOM
You'd think that importing nodes using something (say...element.importNode) would work without the browser all but crashing on you. You'd think that IE would recognize that you have an XHTML DOM in the browser window and an XHTML DOM in the form of element X.

But no.

In comes yet another fucking if/then for IE.

However...wait for it...IE can't handle its own required call to element.cloneNode. Because I have a form coming in.

Fine, I'll take the form out and copy form inputs into the fucking thing. But the most I can get out of the piece of crap: null. Yes, it takes the XML response, recognizes the nodes enough for me to get the token back out of it and then it chokes and dies on the element using the XHTML namespace.

Brilliant.

I'll post the work-around later...once I make one.

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New window does what by default?

File > New Window in IE creates a new window. Fine, I wanted it to, since I can't have a new tab until IE7...

However, why does it default to loading the current page again in the new window? If I make a new window, I don't want to duplicate it! In fact, I can't think of a single reason as to why I would want it to do this. If I wanted to navigate from this page in a new window, I'd fucking right-click on the goddamn link to get me there and open that in a few window.

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Monday, December 12, 2005

Cache issues

Can IE please, please, just listen when I tell it to let go of its cache? I would go to the included files individually (css, javascript, etc.) and hit refresh if it didn't just fucking download the files and open them up in the text editor. When has that ever helped?

Workaround: downloading the Web Developer Toolbar for IE gives you a ton of useful...well, tools. Including: a few different ways of clearing the cache that don't involve going into several layers of options and dialogs!

There you have it: another reason as to why IE sucks hard and a way to get around it.

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Friday, December 09, 2005

Just to get this out in the open right now

I hate IE.

You probably guessed that much already, but stay with me as I intend to expand a little on this. Or add an aside. Whatever.

While I hate IE and it makes me scream in frustration several times every day, I have a lot of respect for the current IE developers. Hence the link I've posted to the IEBlog. I want people to go there and see how much they've opened up the process. They've started working with the Web Standards Project to try to dig IE out of the fucking shit-hole it got stuck in after the first of the great browser wars.

Seriously, I do have respect for the IE team. They post some dumb shit from time to time, but despite the constant (and I mean constant) flaming, they've kept posting whatever they've worked on to go into IE7. From poor Sam who implemented alpha png support to letting designers know exactly what to expect in the next generation of css 2.1 support (yes, they'll have some!), they've worked hard to keep an open dialog with anyone who cares to listen.

So before I post again about what a monstrous pile of shit Microsoft ships for its browser, just keep that in mind.

Posted for readers (once I have some) and the IE team alike (if they ever find this).

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Now it chokes on element.appendChild()?

I should've seen this coming, but apparently IE chokes when using element.appendChild() on a div when the markup to get appended has a form in it.

This just blows my mind. IE has issues with bringing in table pieces (which should act like normal elements, just with some added default style) unless you build the thing element by element, attribute by attribute.

Okay, fine. IE blows with table modification.

But IE can't handle bringing in something when it has a form included somewhere in it? Not even bringing it in and fucking up the style for that piece of the content - it just freaks out and says "No such interface supported" as if it never heard of such an insane method call.

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Thursday, December 08, 2005

First Post

In an effort to vent in a healthy manner, I will vent here. Without further ado, the first (well, first posted here, many other reasons have come before this) reason as to why IE sucks ass:

IE doesn't support element.importNode(), part of the DOM Level 2 Core Specification.

I ran into this and now I have to make IE happy by using element.cloneNode(), which for some reason keeps bringing up an unsupported action error on that line.

That reminds me of today's second reason as to why IE sucks: completely useless alerts when it craps out running JavaScript. Half the time it doesn't even get the line number right (how fucking difficult to get the right line number?), and all of the time the message doesn't even say what went wrong. Might as well give me a bsod, it would help just as much...

Piece of crap.

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