

Allow me to vent! - jgrahamc

Aargh.  Javascript.  DOM model.  Internet Explorer!<p>Having spent all day writing Javascript for a nice reporting application I came to the dreaded moment when I started cross-browser testing.  It's not that everything was broken, it's just that IE debugging Javascript is death by a thousand cuts, or a thousand little incompatibilities.<p>Aargh!
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brk
Unrelated, but sort of not:

I'm in the process of setting up some Windows servers. I haven't really
touched Windows as an OS in a number of years (linux and OS X mostly). I can't
believe how horrible the interaction is, ESPECIALLY with IE. Holy crap, quit
with all the popups about adding sites or whatever. It took me a dozen clicks
after I typed in www.firefox.com just to get the page to load.

I'm amazed that people actually use IE, it's user experience seems like an
experiment in cyber-torture.

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aston
IE7 loads up twice as fast as Firefox, has almost universal compatibility with
web sites, and isn't to my knowledge lacking any significant functionality
that would compel a switch to Firefox (including blocking popups).

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brk
Loads up what twice as fast? Pages or the app itself? I could care less about
app loading times, I hardly ever reboot anything, so once I launch FF, it
stays running.

IE7 now has popup blocking, but it came years behind FF.

Of course, I also use Windows as little as possible, so IE isn't an option in
most cases. And where it is an option, I prefer FF for the extensions anyway.

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aston
Microsoft's Visual Studio doesn't do a horrible job of IE debugging. Just
download the web dev Express version (free) and turn on script debugging in
your Advanced Options.

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jgrahamc
Thanks. I'll do that.

John.

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dottertrotter
I know the feeling. However, sometimes this can be largely avoided by using an
already tested javascript library such as the yui tools or jquery as base. I'm
not sure if they're pertinent to what your doing, but when they are it sure
speeds these things up.

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jgrahamc
This was a pretty heavy prototype/scriptaculous based application. I'm pretty
familiar with the YUI stuff, but have never used jQuery. How does it compare
to prototype?

John.

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cstejerean
Firebug Lite might come in handy. I am strongly considering only supporting
Firefox for the next application I build out of protest for IE's quirks.

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lsb
My recent issue with IE6 (not IE7) is that if you make a checkbox and then set
it, and then insert it into the page, it becomes unchecked, so you can't
easily pass around nodes.

This was IE6 on Windows ME, understandably frustrating after Firefox 2/Safari
on OS X.

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felipe
I used to get frustrated too, until I switched to Flex!

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DanielBMarkham
You know, I love that rich client, cross-platform stuff. But heck, are users
going to tolerate those load times?

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DanielBMarkham
Ah yes. Welcome to the party, dude.

What I did was start with IE, make it work, then "fix" it for FF, Opera, etc.
Somehow that's less fretful than the other way around.

Cross-browser DOM programming will drive you to a good rant, for sure.

