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Apple Details CSS Bugs in Internet Explorer for Mac
Isbiten writes "An article at Apple Developer Connection discusses all the CSS bugs in Microsoft Internet Explorer, and compares IE to other browsers, including Mozilla." Wow, they sure do.
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It kicks some butt.
Glad to see they got some of their data from CodeBitch's Mac Bug List.
Her column is bloody excellent for browser discussion. Always informative and well researched.
I could be wrong, but none of those bugs seemed to address the major problem I have with IE on Mac (apart from it being dog slow...), that weird bug where it doesn't render large slabs of a page at all unless you click on it or resize the window...
unless that's a result of the overflowing/clipping bug...
i don't read slashdot anymore.
of course that link should be this one for GoogleBar....
i don't read slashdot anymore.
Must be a long freakin' list!
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
Now, correct me if I am wrong, cause, hey, I probably am, but does this not seem like just one more subtle insult from Apple to Microsoft? Well-deserved, I might add, but why all these recent jabs?
The switch ads are the obvious, but I find this, and the fact that MS's recent fake switch ad made it to Apple's Hot News page quite interesting from a company that publically expressed all is well between them and MS.
Besides, When you're trying to convince MS users that they can use Mac versions of programs they are used to, why point out serious flaws in one of the biggies??
Unless, of course... you have something better you're planning to push.... (Which I'm not saying must be the oft-rumored iBrowse. Could just be Mozilla)
John Kenneth Fisher
Table of malContents
I wish Apple would concentrate on critizing the browsers for having horrible interfaces. I can only tolerate Explorer, mainly due to it being the ONLY Mac OS X browser to properly support drag+drop. Amazing given it hasn't been updated since version 5 was first released YONKS ago.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
if apple feels so strongly about it they should stop installing it by deault in osx
If so, then the Mac version of MSIE must have much better CSS support than MSIE on Windows.
On Windows MSIE nothing works. Want to use visibillity: collapse? You get crap. Want to collapse borders? No way. Want to use someelement > * all-childs-of-someelement selection? MSIE doesn't bother to understand. Want to use [attiribue=...]? Oh Lord! What's this? And on top of that specifying font-family: sans-serif makes the silly thing to render empty squares in place of Unicode characters (though Unicode Arial is installed)
My pages look exactly as specified in Gecko, fine in Konqueror, acceptably in Opera, ... but MSIE (on Win) renders only crap.
Life is the slowest way to death.
gotta say I hate that +1 bonus. stupid idea...
i don't read slashdot anymore.
--hey thanks for that last link, that's some clean and real nice and pretty work. I bookmaked that page for future reference.
Apple's article demonstrates a "hack" that allows you to target Mac versus Explorer browsers by escaping the asterisk in a closing comment tag. On Windows this causes the browser to "miss" the closing tag and process the css that follows. Needless to say this is a very bad piece of advice on every level. Do not use the so-called "backslash hack." Either Microsoft will fix this Explorer bug and break your code, or they'll *never* fix it because it's too widely depended-upon (like the Windows Registry, for example). Either way this article's author should know better.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Yup... found it after complaining about it... :)
i don't read slashdot anymore.
Chimera
I think the main point of the article has more to do with Apple trying to convince MS to update the Explorer browser than anything else. As noted at the end of the article:
"The best way to avoid [the CSS bugs] is to test all sites in Explorer 5. Even then, though, strange and inexplicable things will happen. Let's hope for the speedy release of Explorer 6."
Translation:
Jab for bugs. Please fix by updating your software.
Too bad for Apple that MS has won the browser war--MS no longer needs Apple--not even an itsy bitsy bit.
These problems are easily fixed; all we need to do is use deCSS to fix it. Too bad it's illegal.
Wait - what?
oh, never mind.
One thing no browser seems to do well - and MSIE on the Mac is abysmal at this - is ignoring threads which have no purpose anymore, as the user has chosen to hook up with a new link.
Scenario: You start to load apple.slashdot, and there are a lot of embedded URLs. About 10% through the load you see a link you want to jump to immediately. So you click it. If you do this on IE for the Mac, you can wait a long time, because the brainiacs who write IE for the Mac let this poor thread compete with all the others already in Q. When it finally gets its chance to run, you can see some progress, but until then you will load GIF after GIF etc on a page you no longer want to see.
It is painfully obvious that all these GETs should be ignored, the threads they run in should be orphaned, but it is as per usual obvious the Microsofties just don't get it.
I don't think so. As you point out, Apple has no incentive to dis IE, which Jaguar installs as the default browser. Not only that, it is very difficult to use another browser as the default without completely erasing IE from your disk. For some reason, if IE is present at all, Jaguar wants to keep it as the default, even if you have explicitly chosen another browser as the default in the System preferences. I have been having a hell of a difficult time to get Jaguar to recognize Mozilla as my default browser, even when it's the only browser on the system. Am I the only one with this problem, or should we (ahem) actually consider IE part of the OS? (yikes!) Anyway I don't think Apple wants to put down IE just to compete with MS.
Something.
-- thinkyhead software and media
If you (or anyone else) is still following this -- there is a tool which deletes the files that create this problem and it has worked for me like a charm. It's the Jaguar Cache Cleaner. Enjoy.