In the last week, I've upgraded Firefox and IE. Firefox 1.5 to 2.0 went very smoothly. It took about 5 minutes to upgrade. I spent the rest of the evening tweaking it, but it basically just worked.

IE6 to IE7 took an hour including a restart of the machine. Why, Why is it such a bloated pile of ****? And why did it leave icons all over the place, grab default browser, install frontpage which then grabbed a whole load of file association defaults? That's all just rude!

But that's not the whole story. I need a copy of IE6 as well to check web pages so I went looking for standalone versions. Needless to say MS doesn't help here. The first call was Evolt. They've hacked, zipped copies that mostly work. Except that cookies didn't work at all. Next stop was Tredosoft, and the Multiie installer. It's basically the same as Evolt but with an old copy of wininet.dll in the same directory. So now I've got a working browser, except that every time a frame loads I get a popup dialog. Luckily I have a windows automation utility I've been using for years and that auto hits "OK" every time the dialog appears.

While doing all this, and trying to debug the cookie problem I went all round the new security settings in IE7. Jeez' there's a lot of them!

Frankly I can't stand the new IE7 UI. But thanks to the wonders of Firefox extensions, I can use the IE7 rendering engine in a Firefox tab. I've then got a cut down IE6 that works just well enough to check CSS layouts in IE6.

Now we get to the real reason for doing this. I've got some fake tabs in the Ecademy web pages that work fine in E6 and Firefox after I discovered a CSS hack to provide different parameters to the two browsers. Like this.

This line is for all non-mozilla browsers
padding: 5px 0px 3px 0px;

This line is for all Mozilla browsers only and overrides the previous line
padding /* */: 3px 0px 1px 0px ;

Except that IE7 executes the second line. But also still disagrees with Firefox about the box model and is a pixel off. Another couple of hours later and I've finally managed to find settings that work identically in IE7 and Firefox. But ferchrisake, why do I have to? CSS is a bloody standard that's well documented. Why can't IE7 and Firefox agree about font sizes and pixel positions in something as simple as height, border, padding and margin? If I spec Arial at 70% and both browsers are using the same Arial font file on my machine, why are the font renderings different sizes?


[ << Skype Extras in 3.0 beta ] [ Void.Bot Skype Chat Bot >> ]
[ 11-Nov-06 10:18am ] [ , , ]