The bane of web developers existence…Internet Explorer

I’ve got two items of note for web developers. One is good…one is evil. First the good news…

In the search to make my life easier I discovered this fantastic download. This company, Tredosoft, building on the discoveries of predecessors, figured out how to organize DLL files to make IE function as a stand alone application. What does this mean? You can with a single install have IE 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 installed and usable on a single Windows installation! WOW. The Rosetta stone of web development. Here is a link to the page: Install multiple versions of IE on your PC.

Now the Evil news. As an adjunct to the previous story, here is one about the dire grave that Microsoft continues to dig…one that we all must lie in. In their infinite wisdom Microsoft has determined that the best way to support standards in their new browser, IE 8, is to add another specialized meta-tag to tell the browser which level of standards the page supports to trigger it to render it. It’s not bad enough that we have to use conditional statements to refer to specific, specially coded CSS files to cater to previous versions. Now we have to use conditional statements AND meta-tags to tell IE which crap implementation to render. I’m disgusted, irate, and generally rendered speechless at the sheer stupidity of Microsoft and their endless quest to sledge hammer square pegs into round holes. Long live Firefox, Safari, and Opera….and any companies that make the world a better, more cooperative place. Here’s the link to the Micro$oft IE blog where you can read all about the insanity.