crossbrowser clusterfk

**garikr** · 02-18-2010 10:52 AM

I was messing around with JavaSript's .scrollTop property. document.documentElement.scrollTop works in Opera and FF but doesn't in Chrome. document.body.scrollTop works in Chrome but not in FF and Opera. Ok, not a biggie, a little fork in a script would not hurt. navigator.appName yields "Opera" in Opera, but both Chrome and FF produce "Netscape". Well, no need to panic, plenty of other stuff in navigator to sort these Netscapes out. navigator.Vendor produces "Google Inc" and "Fedora" (guess that's cause FF came with my Linux). I could also learn more about regular expressions and parse navigator.userAgent string. And that's when I decided to boot into my fresh WinXP installation (messed up my old XP partition installing Linux, but that's besides the point) The horror.... In IE6 my page looks nothing like it used to. The background color is all screwed, no .png support, scrollbars in places I didn't even know they could exist. Putting the page on a flashdrive and taking it to my girlfriends new netbook with IE7 produces the same result, except for one position:fixed div which moved to where it kinda supposed to be. So what do I do? Do I forget about all the semi-fancy stuff and make it basic? Do I write loads of ActiveX .png and other workarounds? Do I make different pages and have PHP serve them according to the browser? Or do I turn my back completely on all the IE users of the world? I'm sure most of you have had similar experiences. Any thoughts/suggestions are more than welcome.
P.S.
Microsoft should track down every Internet Explorer user and pay them to switch to IE8. Bill can write it off as a charitable donation.

**lemon-tree** · 02-18-2010 11:00 AM

Microsoft should track down every Internet Explorer user and pay them to switch to IE8. Bill can write it off as a charitable donation.

Correction, they should pay them to change to Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, anything but IE. In IE6 no website looks right and no sane person should still be using it; not even Google supports IE6 any more. If I had my way nobody would use Internet Explorer, it is by far the least compliant browser available; if you want to see for yourself go to the Acid Test. I'm running Safari and it scored 100/100.

**marshian** · 02-18-2010 11:06 AM

Support for png files has already been added to IE7. I've encountered a number of glitches using IE7 too, but they're usually easily fixable with a bit of css and generally not very numerous. IE8 displays most pages quite well, although still not 100% according to the convention. (But they're getting better ;))
IE6 is old, very old. Even major sites like YouTube have stopped supporting it, or are going to stop doing so soon. IE7 is a major leap forward compared to IE6, it shouldn't give you too much trouble to make your site look correctly in it. Personally, I no longer support IE6. Users using that browser should upgrade, and when they view my site I'll tell them to update, nothing more, nothing less.
It's quite doable to support IE7 on the other hand, so I still support that, even though users can upgrade to IE8 for free. Don't worry about a few minor defects in older browsers though. Just inform users they should update their browser and you've done more than your job.