IE Woes

Submitted by jtreadwell on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 10:53pm

So I'm sitting here at home wasting yet another night trying to reprogram a page I made for someone for the users who work on IE 7 or IE 8. I spend many nights a week doing nothing productive, just reworking existing customizations to get them to work with Internet Exploder. Tonight I think I'm about to get violent. According to everything I can find there is a problem that started with IE 7 (shocking, I know) where a reference to getElementById actually looks for the name attribute, not the ID attribute. So for example lets say we have 2 input boxes:

(input type="text" ID="whatIwant" name="somethingElse" value="1 Million Dollars")
(input type="text" ID="NOTwhatIwant" name="whatIwant" value="To give Bill Gates all my money")

Now lets say those 2 boxes exist. And I'm going to pop up a dialog telling you what I want with a javascript command getting the ID "whatIwant". I'm going to use document.getElementById('whatIwant').value which should give me the value of 1 Million Dollars. This works as expected in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. I asked for Id of 'whatIwant' so it gave me the value of the box where the Id matched that.

Internet Exploder grabs the one where the NAME is 'whatIwant'.

WHY!?!?!?! Why is this the catch all browser that so many people use?!?!

I know what you're thinking "Just make the name and the id both the same", but I can't do that. See PowerSchool, in all it's wisdom, is inconsistent in needing the table information ([01]lastfirst or [students]lastfirst) within the name field. So to be safe I always put the table number in just to make sure it works.

So I dig and dig to see if there is a better code to use that is consistent between browsers. All I find is more evidence that this problem is real and it appears that at least one source states that a known work around actually exposes another IE security issue. That's right folks, fixing one issue opens a different security risk.

I am just ranting here today because... I'm frustrated. This shouldn't be this way. How is it OK to let the giant company think it's OK that their product doesn't follow any standards set by anyone anywhere EVER! They are an island. They act without any regard for anyone else and they might even be doing this on purpose to make you feel like you can't switch to something else. How many sites are there that are IE only because the company that built the site made sure it worked on IE but since IE doesn't exist in the same reality as everyone else they have to use codes that don't behave correctly anywhere else. I've seen IE only sites and anything except IE sites. I've seen IE only sites that break every time IE is updated.

That's another thing, while I'm ranting. I work with one school that has IE 6, 7 and 8 on different computers. Some programming works on 6 but not 7 or 8. Some works on 6 and 7 but not 8. Some works on 6 and 8 but not 7. Some works on 6 always, and works on 7 and 8 if you go in and perform a certain task (directions of which changed between 7 and 8 of course). If you don't perform this task you just get a blank spot where certain things should be and no error saying something failed. In other words, you just think the page loaded and there wasn't data or that was what it was supposed to look like. Is this OK with the IE loving community? Even those who like IE have got to admit that this is a bit of a problem.

OK, I quit for today. Another day, another unsatisfied user.

People, this is my PSA: Friends don't let friends use inferior browsers. If you see a friend using IE, gently whack them upside the head and show them what a real browser looks like. There are many out there. All of them are better. Be a friend, give the gift of sanity. Together we can make the world a IE free place (or at least get Microsoft's attention and get them to fix it).

Jason "Internet Explorer is making me go grey" Treadwell

Comments

Blame it on the Developers!

Submitted by scaleb on Tue, 04/20/2010 - 10:38am.

You can rant all you want, but IE will never go away unless developers stop coding for it. The folks that go out of their way to write non-standard code so that it will run on IE are just as much to blame as the people that use IE in the first place.

Make it known to the world and proudly stand firm, that your web sites, web apps, and web widgets, are NOT IE COMPATIBLE.

People WILL stop using it if nothing supports it.

One of the reasons we dont

Submitted by rjdyer on Wed, 12/02/2009 - 10:08am.

One of the reasons we dont switch to firefox is because not everything works in FF and the last thing we want to do is confuse our end users by giving them multiple browsers to use. It is a catch 22, the vast majority of the world uses IE so most of the websites are built for IE and this just perpetuates the cycle.

I was trying to code a page in PowerSchool so that our building secretaries could easily mass email our parents... I was using a hyperlink to pass guardianemail into the outlook bcc field for the selected students but guess what!?! Internet explorer has a maximum URL size limitation that prevented me from doing it this way. In case you are wondering the URL size limit for IE is 2,083 characters... for the sake of comparison the other browsers still functioned properly well after 100,000 characters.

Re: One of the reasons we dont

Submitted by brian_andle on Wed, 12/02/2009 - 11:19am.

Currently according to w3schools.com's browser statistics IE is less then 50% (Actually #38%) of the browsers used to access the web. With FF at 47%, Chrome 8.5%, Safari 3.8%. I know those numbers are subjective and don't mean much.

At out school we have 2 main sites that use IE, IEPDirect and the State website The rest all work with FF.

browser statistics

Submitted by MattFreund on Wed, 12/02/2009 - 2:31pm.

I think those are just stats though for people going to the w3schools.com web site - from http://w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp -

"Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files, over a five year period, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends."

Here are some other stats - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

It'd be interesting to see the browser stats from PowerSource visitors (non-PS employees) as that may give a good indication of browsers used by PS users.

Matt

GRR - I hate it when

Submitted by jtreadwell on Mon, 11/16/2009 - 4:10pm.

I hate it when IE does something I want and FF or some other browser doesn't. AHHHH to mixed results! I've made standards based report cards that are easily customizable and they have 3 graphs per term (overall reading, writing, math performance). Used Fusion charts to build the graphs, seemed like the obvious answer. But now IE will print the graphs normally and none of the other browsers (Opera, FireFox, Chrome, Safari) will show them at the correct dimensions. AnyChart seems to have a fix that I'm trying to make work for me too but man does that suck that I need a fix for FF and not IE. I did love their reasoning as to why we need to worry about fire fox. Here's some lovely data... use as you wish.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Why can't things just work for every browser?

Anyone know how to use this: http://www.anychart.com/blog/projects/acprintmanager/

Jason Treadwell
Custom Solutions Specialist
jason@powerdatasolutions.org
www.powerdatasolutions.org

Let's all use FireFox

Submitted by brian_andle on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 12:28pm.

Matt is correct, if you are in a Windows environment the default browser will more then likely be IE. One of the best parts about a Windows Domain is Group Policy and the ability to push out msi based software. Personally in our District I push FireFox out using Group Policy. There is a awesome msi version of FireFox at http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/ and there is even a build that is GPO enabled for network administrators to manage the FireFox settings http://www.frontmotion.com/FMFirefoxCE/index.htm

Brian Andle

RE: Let's all use FireFox

Submitted by MattFreund on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 1:09pm.

Thanks Brian, that's good info. Can you or Jason add it to the Links area? Having it there would give us a place to point network admins to in order to help save them time researching the alternatives.

Matt

why people use it

Submitted by MattFreund on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 11:47am.

I think the reason why IE is so common has a lot to do with a network administrators control and network settings, and the time and money it would take to change things. If the system is using a Windows server, then it's easy to integrate IE with group policy settings right out of the box. Introducing another browser means the network admin needs to take the time to install the browser (most likely they have workstations set up with limited rights to keep users from installing software themselves) and take the time to research to see if the browser will work with the group policy and then take the time to integrate it.

Needless to say, I don't think too many network admins will spend the time if other things are more pressing just because someone needs a browser that works with a custom page. If they read part of the problem is PS related and how it's inconsistent with table information in the html then they may take the approach too that it's not just the browser. If PS would fix the table problem or release pages themselves that didn't work right in IE, then that would help :)

Personally I use both Firefox and IE, mostly Firefox. But I have the luxury of deciding which to use since it's my computer. Many PS users don't have that luxury since it's the school's computer and out of their control and are stuck unless you can convince the network admins to change. For small networks it may not be a big deal but when hundreds of computers are involved it may be low on the priority list. Just remember they may be as loyal to MS as you are to Apple, so calling it Internet Exploder or taking shots at Bill Gates may not go over very well with them :)

Matt

IE drives me crazy as well

Submitted by bjohnson on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 9:26am.

IE drives me crazy as well with all the inconsistencies. Such simple things that won't work in IE require such crazy hacks sometimes.

This is why I now rely on a javascript framework like Jquery when doing web development. I have found that the framework authors have resolved many of the browser specific issues for the stuff I want to do. All I need to worry about is learning the simple function provided in the framework. This solves my javascript problems with IE, but there are certainly plenty of css and html rendering things to worry about as well...

I am doing my part by trying to get anyone I know to use Firefox. :)

Brent Johnson

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