I was listening to Audible Ajax Episode 18 — the interview with the IE7 team — yesterday, and about halfway into the podcast, I heard something that had me fall out of my chair with laughter. One of the guys (sorry, they all look alike on a podcast) mentioned that if you surf the web for a prolonged period of time with IE7, you begin to see little anomalies in presentation, functionality, etc. If you dig a little deeper, you see that people are depending on IE6 quirks and bugs to get their sites to render and perform correctly. Aside from the hillarity of everyone having to unquirk their sites and applications when IE7 comes out in general release, it is an object lesson in how Microsoft can embrace and extend a set of standards even if they don’t mean to.
Hopefully the IE releases will be coming faster now, and bugs won’t have a chance to be enshrined as standards anymore.
There are some very exotic IE bugs that I had the pleasure of having to find during my days as a DHTML consultant.
Did you know that when you load a load a page an call document.location.replace the memory taken by the replaced page was not cleared.
I had an application that was leaking like a crashing plain after a while I set my eyes on this method and thought that I usually use the document.location.href and so does the rest of the world.
IE bugs are really a piece of work there are a lot of places where you can not work using standards as it wont work on IE. For example why cant you set HTMLElement.style.right and HTMLElement.style.left on an absolute element as Mozilla does and as specified in the W3c specs?
“Leaking like a crashing plain” – awesome, that’s my new chat name.