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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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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.
I've actually found Mozilla to work on more sites than Chimera does at the moment...
I like the look and idea of Chimera, but I read the Sydney Morning Herald online a fair bit, and it regularly crashes if you go to an article and then go back to the main page. Something to do with their annoying flash ads..
plus I get to use the GoogleBar....
i don't read slashdot anymore.
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
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.
They don't have to bundle Explorer anymore, the five-year agreement with MS is over. But Chimera is still in beta, OmniWeb is not finished, Mozilla is a bloated suite, Opera is not ready for prime time...
It's called "constructive criticism". No need to take such a "love it or leave it" attitude. You can like something and still find fault with it.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
I hate to bring bad news, but it might be your system. I am using Chimera 0.5 and I went to the Sydney Morning Herald to see what would happen. I went to ten different stories, I even changed sections and went through the business and national sections and it never crashed when I used the back button to return to the main page. I had a similiar problem to yours with Chimera a while ago but I have since formated and freshly installed 10.2 and I have no problems now. I think the issue came from either TinkerTool or Dave.
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
I love OmniWeb and it is my primary browser. But this is something I hope they fix in the next version.
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.
Taken from the DOJ 's conclusions of law of the Microsoft anti-trust case:
"Apple increased its distribution and promotion of Internet Explorer not because of a conviction that the quality of Microsoft's product was superior to Navigator's, or that consumer demand for it was greater, but rather because of the in terrorem effect of the prospect of the loss of Mac Office. To be blunt, Microsoft threatened to refuse to sell a profitable product to Apple, a product in whose development Microsoft had invested substantial resources, and which was virtually ready for shipment. Not only would this ploy have wasted sunk costs and sacrificed substantial profit, it also would have damaged Microsoft's goodwill among Apple's customers, whom Microsoft had led to expect a new version of Mac Office. The predominant reason Microsoft was prepared to make this sacrifice, and the sole reason that it required Apple to make Internet Explorer its default browser and restricted Apple's freedom to feature and promote non-Microsoft browsing software, was to protect the applications barrier to entry. More specifically, the requirements and restrictions relating to browsing software were intended to raise Internet Explorer's usage share, to lower Navigator's share, and more broadly to demonstrate to important observers (including consumer, developers, industry participants, and investors) that Navigator's success had crested. Had Microsoft's only interest in developing the Mac OS version of Internet Explorer been to enable organizational customers using multiple PC operating-system products to standardize on one user interface for Web browsing, Microsoft would not have extracted from Apple the commitment to make Internet Explorer the default browser or imposed restrictions on its use and promotion of Navigator."
Microsoft threatened to hold back development of software for the Mac platform. Apple wasn't in a position to refuse the money.
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.
As far as I can tell this is fixed in Omniweb 4.1.1b1 under Jaguar (the ability to drag complete files into the Finder was not part of cocoa until Jaguar; IE is a carbon app).