Revert Back to Internet Explorer 6!!!
” . . . if it works on FF, the chances of it working well on IE7 is very high. It’s a math’s game - it’s my method to reduce the amount of failed products.”
I reverted back to Internet Explorer 6 today after upgrading to 7 for a while. If I weren’t a web developer I wouldn’t have done this, but I am. And I need to make sure my projects will work in FF, IE6 and IE7. And here’s what I felt and found over the last few weeks of living with IE7.
If my stuff works well on FF, it generally works well in IE7. IE7 offers full PNG support, they corrected the faulty box/padding/margin module problems since the IE6 days, so overall, the failure rate on IE7 is less than 5% I’d say. There are some differences in the way it handles Javascript and what not (for example, when parsing through XML, textContent is the Mozilla standard, while text is the Microsoft standard, so that was a bit tricky.. especially when the nodeValues doesn’t work for some mysterious reason…), but that’s manageable.
But what I did find is that, the failure rate on IE6 after testing properly on FF, was around 30%. This is just a gut estimate so don’t try to quote me on these figures, but I’d rather make sure it works on FF and IE6, because if it works on FF, the chances of it working well on IE7 is very high. It’s a math’s game - it’s my method to reduce the amount of failed products.
I still haven’t figured out how to run both IE6 and IE7 without having to hack through the registry or run some sketchy script, so I’m not going to go there yet. I am debating, however, getting a cheap cheap computer from my dad (he has them lying around) so I can run IE 6 on that one as the testing unit and a storage unit perhaps.
And of course, today I realized that I still have the sidebar of my blog showing up way down below on IE6 (no wonder my ad click rates were so low) and I fixed it once and for all. Last time I was trying to fix it for a few days, I think I got distracted somehow and then installed IE7 so it slipped away from me.
Speaking of PNGs, why are so many sites slow to support this open standard?! I can’t tell you how many social netwworking sites, like MyBlogLog, etc…that support only jpg or gif formats when uploading an avatar. Get with the program! Fortunately, (here comes the Mac fanboy plug) Preview in OS X allows you to save as PDF GIF JPG PICT BMP PNG and a bunch of others instantly no matter what the original format.
Ya macs handle graphics better I agree.
With windows.. well. I need to open Photoshop or Imageready to save as PNG.
PNG support in IE is a bit tricky - web designers need to put in the Alpha image loader to made the alpha transparency work (whereas Mozilla browsers already support it in full, and now IE7 does), so I’ll bet you a lot of these guys skip out on programming that code in.
That’s probably why a lot of sites still don’t support it. Also, aren’t PNG files larger in size, if I remember correctly? For large sites, this could be a bandwidth issue as well as a server hard drive issue. JPGs and GIFs are so brutally simple and small.
Wikipedia has a nice explanation (jumps to comparison but rest of article has good info):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG#Comparison_with_JPEG