Your money is safe with us (javascript error)

I’m on the team that develops a stats package for our product at my job. It’s a web app showing all the activity on the customer’s website. At the beginning of the project, we decided that we didn’t want to spend the time to hack the code to work in IE6, so we set the system requirements at FF2+ and IE7+. (No Safari either, but that’s a separate issue.) Any web developer will tell you that 40-50% of the time it takes to build a website is spent making the thing work in IE. IE sucks.

This was all well and good, since at the time of this writing IE7 has been out for about 14 months and has been easily available via Windows Update to anybody with an internet connection.*

Then it bit us. One of our customers is some bank in Nebraska or Kansas or some other flyover and they only use IE6 and therefore can’t access the stats program. “Sorry, we don’t support IE6.” “Well, we need it to work and we aren’t allowed to upgrade or download any other browser. Please fix.”

There are many places I wouldn’t keep my money: on the trunk of my car; in a fireplace; hidden under my porch; mixed in with the cat food. However, I would feel much safer with my money in any of those places than in a bank that only uses IE6 on purpose.

* I’m not advocating IE to anybody. Not even a little. It is the most awful software every to appear anywhere. But if you have to kick yourself in the balls everyday, you might as well do it wearing the newest shoes possible.

Epitome of Unfair

The moral: Unconsciously do something wrong + continue to do something wrong = get away. Unconsciously do something wrong + fix your mistake = busted.

Every single day I sit in traffic on 280 in the second lane from the left watching the carpool lane fly by…mostly cheaters with one person in the car. “If I ever do that, I’d be totally busted.”

Yesterday I left work and traffic was moving along nicely in all lanes. I’m in a fairly good mood as I sing along to the radio (how can you NOT sing along to “More Than A Feeling”?). Out of the corner of my eye I see the cop car ahead of me in the next lane. I look down and see the carpool lane under me.

FUCK!

At this point I realize that somehow I ended up in the carpool lane…not because I was cheating, just because I wasn’t paying attention and all the lanes were moving along at a good pace.

I see there is a space directly in front of the cop. Now here is my choice…keep going in the carpool lane or get back into the appropriate lane in front of a cop. I only have a split second to decide and I decide I’m going to fix my mistake and go back into the appropriate lane.

Clearly, this was the wrong choice. The cops party lights come on and I get a nice ticket for HOV violation. Fuck.

I’m pretty sure that if I had just stayed in the carpool lane she wouldn’t have even seen me and I would have gotten away with the commuter equivalent of murder.

The moral: Unconsciously do something wrong + continue to do something wrong = get away. Unconsciously do something wrong + fix your mistake = busted.

Does a website suck?

This just in: IE sucks.

Chris Wilson…IE Mastermind
and WWF stunt double

I read this article featuring an interview with the architect (mastermind) behind MS Internet Explorer. This is one architect I wouldn’t hire to build my front porch…out of fear that my porch will need critical updates every week to keep my neighbors out, or to keep it from crumbling my house for no good reason.

Things of note: the interview started with Windows crashing. I’d comment on that, but it’s just too easy.

IE6 didn’t display semi-transparent PNG files correctly. He admits to the problem “we have certainly some problems with PNG files in the past” but then goes on to say that the problem was confined to “narrow cases”. Narrow cases? If you consider the main advantage to using PNG format “narrow” then that’s true.

He then defends the uber-tight integration to Windows, which is what it is. Doesn’t really matter. Apple does the same thing with Safari and WebKit. The problem comes when the security of the browser is so shitty that you can remotely catch the computer on fire. Not good.

Why is the IE7 download over twice the size of Firefox? He claims “backward compatibility”. Huh?

So his answer to backward compatibility is just to ship extra parts of Windows with IE7? That seems a bit strange. FF doesn’t need to ship extra parts of Windows.

Here’s the best part. When asked about why, after 10+ years, IE still doesn’t support the W3C standard he says this gem:

Oh, so the reason IE sucks is because the standard sucks. Got it. And the reason IE doesn’t follow the sucky standard is because the standard sucks. Yup. This sounds exactly like an error message I might find in just about any corner of Windows.

In other words: “We did our own thing and made a shitty product in spite of the spec and people made shitty sites. So now if we make a good product, the shitty sites, which are our fault, will break. It’s very important that sites not break because of IE.” What a fucktard.

Why no plugin architecture for IE? Cuz it’s too hard:

Outstanding.

The best part: he looks like a pro wrestler.

More browser fun: