Problems with Internet Explorer
September 5, 2006
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My friend Rick Cockrum was kind enough to let me know about a problem Internet Explorer is having applying the style sheets to SuccessCREEations here. It seems that sometimes IE chooses to forget to apply any formatting to pages here until after the refresh button is clicked. And sometimes pages are shown correctly the first time.
I haven’t been able to see any rhyme or reason to how IE is behaving or to detect a pattern. Go figure.
There is a work around but it is cumbersome and it will eliminate one of the nice features of this theme, which is its flexibility and ease to make changes. I’ve been in contact with the author of the theme to see if we can come up with a less labor intensive solution.
In the mean time Iet me suggest that this might be a good opportunity for all of you IE users out there to make the switch to Firefox for your browsing pleasure. I use FF and didn’t even realize there was a problem until Rick brought it to my attention.
I am a big fan of Firefox because of it is so customizable. It is an open source program which means that folks program all sorts of extensions and plugins which you can install with a click of the mouse to tailor your browser to fit your needs. The tabbed browsing feature of FF is something that I didn’t see value in until I started using it. Now I am lost without it!
Anyway I’ll go through the work required to make the IE tyrant happy again soon. Please bear with me until that is done.
And thanks Rick for the heads up.
I hate IE when it comes to formatting. I use Firefox, too. When I first started using style sheets on my software site, I only looked at it in Firefox. I got it just the way I wanted it, then asked my wife, who uses IE, to look. She did and told me it was broken. It was, badly. So back to the drawing board. Unfortunately, over half the people who come to my sites use IE, so now I design in IE, and verify in Firefox.
Yeah, Rick. It seems that the issue may be the fact that this particular template uses a style.php file instead of a style.css file to allow all of the easy customization. Apparently IE doesn’t like that so much.
I may end up having to manually code up the style.css file with all my preferences to make it work right. The author has some ideas for me to check out first. But they may end up being even more time consuming than just biting the bullet and fixing it manually.
You’re probably right about the source of the problem. IE is brain-dead in some respects. If it were me, I would try the author’s suggestions if they allow easy customizations. The long-term savings would be worth the time spent now if they work. And over time IE 6 will go away as IE 7 comes on board. Six months ago 2/3 of my visitors used IE. That percentage is down to just over half now. It’s slowly losing ground.
That’s an interesting statistic about IE … 2/3’s down to half… (by the way I use v7.0.5700.6 release and everything looks fine).
About 8 months ago my IE users on my blogs were about 94% usage .. then, about 5 months ago slipped down to about 75% .. Nowadays .. it’s back up to 85%-90% on all my blogs - except one (1800HART which I usually link when I’m commenting around other friendly blogger’s and those in it for the money too somewhat).
I believe the rest of the world and general surfing public are finally realizing that Firefox ‘aint so hot anymore and people aren’t believing that hype anymore. IEv7 is great and that’s my main browser .. but I also use Firefox (mostly for the Aardvark plugin) for those sites that are not I.E friendly .. I even load up Flock and Opera at times.
Of course, HART’s mind works in mysterious ways .. I’m like that. I get along with all browsers ~