74 posts tagged “internet-explorer”
2008
Gears 0.2 Released! New modules are HttpRequest and Timer, both for use within workers (which provide Erlang-style message passing concurrency). Particularly interesting is that the Gears HttpRequest module can be used for much cleaner Comet implementations in IE.
We've decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we've posted previously.
— IEBlog
Sunsetting Quirks Mode. Apparently proper standards support in IE (or at least the IE8 renderer) will be triggered by the HTML5 doctype, providing an alternative to those who don’t wish to pollute their markup with an IE-specific meta tag.
Legacy. James Bennett has what I think is the most interesting analysis of the X-UA-Compatible header to date.
If Web authors actually use this feature, and if IE doesn't keep losing market share, then eventually this will cause serious problems for IE's competitors — instead of just having to contend with reverse-engineering IE's quirks mode and making the specs compatible with IE's standards mode, the other browser vendors are going to have to reverse engineer every major IE browser version, and end up implementing these same bug modes themselves.
No matter what great leaps forward the Internet Explorer team make from now on, the majority of developers won’t use them and the majority of users won’t see them. By doing this the Internet Explorer team may have created their own backwater, shot themselves in the foot and left themselves for dead.
If you want CSS rules to apply to unknown elements in IE, you just have to do document.createElement(elementName). This somehow lets the CSS engine know that elements with that name exist.
The versioning switch is not a browser detect. PPK: “In other words, the versioning switch does not have any of the negative effects of a browser detect.”
Like DOCTYPE switching did in 2000, version targeting negates the vendor argument that existing behaviors can't be changed for fear of breaking web sites. If IE8 botches its implementation of some CSS property or DOM method, the mistake can be fixed in IE9 without breaking sites developed in the IE8 era. This actually makes browser vendors more susceptible to pressure to fix their bugs, and less fearful of doing so.
Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8. This has huge implications for client-side web developers: IE 8 will include the ability to mark a page as “tested and compatible with the IE7 rendering engine” using an X-UA-Compatible HTTP header or http-equiv meta element. It’s already attracting a heated debate in the attached discussion.
2007
Jash: JavaScript Shell (via) An advanced JavaScript interactive shell bookmarklet that works in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari.
Conversation with Bill Gates about IE8 and Microsoft Transparency. Molly asks the tough questions about IE8—it looks like there should be a lot of IE8 material at MIX08 next year.
Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6. 24ways kicks off again, with the first article introducing super-sleight, an updated script for getting transparent PNGs to work in IE6.
DebugBar. Suggested at BarCamp London 3 as a useful tool for developing with IE; apparently includes a great JavaScript debugger.
IE ActiveX(“htmlfile”) Transport, Part II. Fascinating tricks for working around IE memory leaks using explicit CollectGarbage() calls and setInterval() to an empty function.
Using multiple classes within selectors. Pretty much definitive guide to using multiple classes in a CSS selector, including problems with IE 5 and 6 and one way of addressing them using conditional comments.
Global namespace pollution in IE. Another reason to avoid JavaScript global variables like the plague: IE creates a bunch of them for you which may well intefere with your own code.
Seeking market share, Microsoft removes WGA anti-piracy check from IE7. Hopefully this will accelerate the rise of IE7 over IE6.
I have another technique [...] that I'll be switching jQuery to. If you attempt to insert into the document.body before the document is fully loaded, an exception is thrown. I take advantage of that to determine when the document is fully loaded.
DOMContentLoaded for IE, Safari, everything, without document.write. Stuart has taken Hedger’s recent IE technique, combined it with the others and compressed it in to a short-as-possible code snippet that you can paste in to your scripts without having to include the whole of jQuery/YUI/Dojo/Prototype.
IEContentLoaded. An alternative method of detecting DOMContentLoaded on IE; works by polling until the doScroll() method on an unattached element stops throwing errors.
HTTPOnly cookie support in Firefox. Five years after the bug was filed, HTTPOnly cookie support has gone in to the Mozilla 1.8 branch. This is a defence in depth feature that has been in IE for years—it lets you set cookies that aren’t available to JavaScript, and hence can’t be hijacked in the event of an XSS flaw.
Fixing GC issues on IE 6: New IE download. Microsoft have released Windows Script Host / Script Runtime version 5.7, which apparently cleans up a bunch of IE 6 memory leaks.
Operation Aborted. Another fantastically obscure IE bug: appending new elements to the HEAD element breaks if a BASE tag is present.
Background Iframe (bgiframe). jQuery plugin that inserts an iframe shim behind an element in IE, allowing the element to be positioned overlapping a select box without the select box showing through.
Brendan Eich: New Projects. Exciting new projects from Mozilla. ActionMonkey is joined by IronMonkey (IronPython/IronRuby on Tamarin) and ScreamingMonkey (Tamarin for IE). Upgrading IE’s JavaScript using the Flash Player as a vector is a game-changing idea.
Does the idea of redefining the role of the Internet browser appeal to you? Do the terms HTTP, RSS, Microformats, and OpenID, excite you? If so, then this just might be the opportunity for you.
Conflicting Absolute Positions. Neat technique, although it uses CSS expressions for IE compatibility so it may break down in IE 5 and 6 when JavaScript is disabled.
Gaping holes exposed in fully-patched IE 7, Firefox (via) Michal Zalewski released a new Firefox 2.0 vulnerability in addition to the IE cookie stealing one.
IE vulnerability allows cookie stealing. Full exploit against the same-domain cookie origin policy, so malicious sites can steal cookies from elsewhere. Avoid using IE until this is patched.