Microsoft acknowledges that there were many bugs in IE6 and IE7, and promises IE8 will be much more standards-compliant. In order to make it act in a more standards-compliant way, however, you will have to include a non-standard tag in your HTML HEAD section. Otherwise it will continue to act like the pieces of bloated crapware that IE6 and IE7 were.

Thanks for the big “fuck you”, Microsoft. How about paying everyone back for all the time they’ve wasted dealing with your crappy browsers?

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Love it or hate it… well… does anyone really love Internet Explorer?

But you have to live with it, at least if you’re doing web development, because it’s necessary to test against it. It’s so buggy that many people code first against it, make their site work on it (given that it has the bulk of the browser market share) and then try to get their site working with other, less buggy, more standards-compliant browsers without breaking their Internet Explorer compatibility.

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I’ve finally updated the Wordpress themes on all three of my blogs. I rolled out the new theme to this blog and Shiny Things a while back; I’ve just moved the Apocalypse Blog over to it, too.

I had several motivations in doing these new themes. I did them from scratch. One motivation was to improve my CSS skills and learn more about cross-browser issues (man do they suck!).

I also wanted to improve the way that the blogs are monetized (that phrase really rolls of the tongue…). The new theme has three elements that help monetize the blogs. The first is the memory finder in the header. The second is the Google ads. The third is the Amazon box in the right hand column (this is only present on the Apocalypse blog at the moment as I haven’t picked out Amazon items for the other blogs yet).

The memory finder feels to me like it fits in well with Shiny Things and isn’t too far off base here (after all, what developer couldn’t use more RAM?), but it doesn’t really fit in at all on the Apocalypse Blog. Then again nobody’s bought memory through it yet so perhaps it’s just pointless.
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Internet Explorer is often the bain of the web developer’s existence. Read the standards, see how it’s supposed to be done, and then try to figure out how to coerce Internet Explorer into doing it while still getting other browsers to work correctly.

Microsoft fumbled the ball after Internet Explorer 6 - they rested on their market share as it slowly eroded. They’re now planning to release Internet Explorer 8 only a couple of years after 7 was released, according to an article at The Register. Apparently they still haven’t decided that standards are really important.

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