Tag: ie9

Another “WTF?!” IE9 Bug

With Internet Explorer’s complete lack of support for any of the neat and useful CSS styles, one always has to revert to Microsoft’s disgusting “filter” hack. The filters don’t take in very many useful parameters (such as color stops in gradients) and disable text anti-aliasing. 

But here’s something you probably really didn’t see coming – under IE9 only (this doesn’t affect IE8), filters completely cripple events. If you define any mouse over or even click events, they will not fire.

This created a situation where I could no longer use a horizontal sliding accordion, because IE doesn’t support text rotation and uses a … you guessed it … filter.

I hate Microsoft so much … so very very much …

Don’t Use JavaScript To Detect Browser

Just a word of warning – if you need to check for a specific version of Internet Explorer, do not rely on JavaScript. While working on a project where I was applying JavaScript to customize a closed-source package (yes, we were allowed to do this by the provider), we wanted to make sure that users were using only IE8 and up.

Fairly simple, right?

Well, no. It seems the package we were using was putting IE9 into quirks mode, which (much to my surprise) causes the user agent string to report the browser as IE7.

So, no JavaScript to detect the browser version.

On the server-side, the user agent was coming through correctly, so at least we had a different avenue on which we could proceed, but it seems rather peculiar that there would be no way to correctly identify a browser because of how it is rendering the page.