Due to my recent experiences with Internet Explorer I have now switched to Firefox as my main browser. Even though Internet Explorer works great from a user’s standpoint I cannot continue to use it. I recently had some nightmares about browser compatibility issues which now makes Internet Explorer too painful to use.

Oh, for all of you viewing this website on Internet Explorer 6 or earlier I am sorry. If you want to see what it is supposed to look like look at it in IE7 or any other browser that is on the market today.

Ugh Internet Explorer. Good Morning from Taiwan and peace out.

Well in my last entry I was having an extremely annoying problem with a site that I was working on in IE. When I used transparencies IE just turned off cleartype and gave me nasty and difficult to read text. Since I didn’t think that the organization would want crappy text I had to think of a workaround.

In the process of fumbling around the internets I discovered that all of the CSS Filters, that ONLY Internet Explorer supports, turn off cleartype when they are used. There is a workaround to enclose the internal text in a relatively positioned div tag but that does not work for the opacity filter. Since Internet Explorer does not support conventional methods of handling opacity the filter method was the only way available to me. I had thought of some one crazy workaround but I didn’t want to go that route because it was overly complicated. I scoured the internets and found nothing that would work. The only workaround that I found was the exact one that I thought of. Boy was I pissed.

What I had to do was use Internet Explorer only comments (can you believe it? they know that their browser has issues so they have this comment syntax that ONLY internet explorer will see) to comment out the text that worked fine in every other browser. Then I had to use an Internet Explorer only html if statement to load the text if the page was loaded in Internet Explorer. Here comes the stupid part. The internet explorer text had to be brought into the page after the translucent div tag. Then I had to absolutely position it directly on top of the translucent div. So now I have this stupid hack on this page that I made. God I am hating Internet Explorer right now.

Here is what the text looks like on Internet Explorer 8 after my “workaround.”

Here it is before my overly complicated workaround.

And here is the Firefox rendering with no workarounds needed.

The difference is that the Internet Explorer 8 rendering with the workaround has a translucent background but not translucent text. I think I can change the coloring of the text to give it the right effect but I am too annoyed to deal with it right now. whatever, problem solved, in my case at least.

My final word on this is “get Firefox.” Then hopefully one day when people make web pages they won’t even take Internet Explorer’s idiosyncrasies into account when designing websites.

Long live Firefox! peace out!