Browser Wars

Why I hates Browser Programming – it’s Wicked. Tricksy, False.

So I have a simple little task for work – some backend database with a simple CRUD browser interface. Should be easy, right? Couple days max. Whip up the MYSQL database, slap together some php goodness, and then a little javascript and ajax to make a pretty browser interface that doesn’t need ugly frames or refreshing or bogosity like that. Cake walk, right?

And it was… in firefox. Tried it on IE8… epic fail. EPIC. IE 6? Ok, that was the epic, IE8 was just fail. Chrome? Yeah, Chrome is a long way off. Safari? Well, that worked pretty good. Opera? Naw, no one uses opera anyway…

In a nutshell the areas of badness are

  • IE can’t handle a non-blocking ajax call, you HAVE to use the blocking version
  • IE can’t collapse table rows
  • IE6 can’t understand ‘table-row’ means ”
  • IE is persnickety about innerHTML it will accept and where it accept it – hint, use a <div> block and be explicit.

So, not too bad. Just a few hours of google to fix that, and we’re all good.

I’m sure you folks that do this coding for a living already know this stuff. I dunno how you put up with it.