“Just when I thought you couldn’t possibly be any dumber, you go and do something like this… and totally redeem yourself!”
I love to design and develop web sites, I really enjoy it, it fulfills me like building a model as a child or a lego building or fixing my bike. Except when I’m happy with a page and I go into IE Tester to see how it looks in IE6 & IE7. But I’ve reached a point where I can win an honest argument against wasting my time and my clients time and money testing for IE6. So I’m happy to have that phase of my life retiring nicely into the sunset. And whenever I leave the safe confines of Firefox or Safari or Chrome and wander into IE8, it has served me well and displayed my work just as well. So I’ve reached a point where the idea of IE web browsers doesn’t make my hair stand up.
But of course, just when I’m ready to accept IE8 and not hide the icon on my families’ computer or make it link to Firefox, I start playing with CSS3. Oh CSS3, your fun! Rounded corners, text drop shadows! It’s like making motor cycle noises while doing wheelies on my bike! Fun and free and easy! I’m just getting to know you and it’s going so well! I even designed this website with some of your features (chicks dig rounded corners!). I talked to a friend and he used some text drop shadows! Neato!
And then I read more about CSS3 and notice that there are some mentions about Internet Explorer 8 not working with some of the features. And the dark cloud rolls back into my world. I go and look at some CSS3 stuff in IE8, and there it is, my nice 15px rounded corners are square. My friend’s fun shadow text on rollover if just one layer of text.
And just like that all my hate towards IE comes right back to me. So let me get this straight IE, I play with 2 new CSS3 features which are awesome, makes me excited to learn more, and you go and poop all over them?!
We could of been friends, we were turning the corner and you went and robbed from my Mom. You bent my rim, twisted my lego, spit on my basketball court.
And now we are right back to square one. I am the token nerd in mine and my in-laws family, they come to me whenever they have any cpu issues, and I would update all their browsers and add Firefox to their desktops, but I got soft and stopped for a while. But I am renewing my vow to avoid you and all over your devil spawn. I will work on their computer one at a time and remove your icon from their desktops and trays and un-pin it from their start menus. And if they insist on keeping you because they are afraid of change, I will link your icon to Firefox.
You can text me again when you update and start working with CSS3, but don’t call me. I don’t want to hear your voice. I know your issues are to the core and not on the surface, and because of this, you can’t be in my life, even when you come back looking pretty, new and refreshing. I know you may looked like you changed, but it’s a external change only.
I’m not even going to ask you about html5.
Once again, this relationship is over.
Update: I just came across IE6 No More! It is a project to help end the use of old Internet Explorer browsers. If you are a developer, please implement their code where you can.
If you are looking for a simple and fantastic sliding panel javascript library for web design work, I stumbled upon one that I learned to love because I had it working in 5 minutes.