Troubleshooting Internet Explorer

I’ve been working my tail off at work so we can ship the new version of our flagship product. I really cut my teeth on advanced Javascript with this project which began several months ago. I’ve stretched my CSS abilities, too. And I’ve spent more time debugging than in any other point in my life.

This approximates my life in the past two weeks:

As you can see, while the deadline approaches, tickets filed increases exponentially. This is not because of poor quality control so much as fixing bugs in actual functionality causes ridiculous visual bugs in IE, which bear no rational explanation.

IE is my new Kryptonite. But perhaps not for the reasons you’d think. Until recently, I’d almost defended it, because I’d had only the usual broken-box-model CSS issues and no Javascript issues at all. “Sure, it’s broken,” I’d say, gamely. “But at least it’s consistently broken.”

I should have known how the Universe pays back people who say such things.

This is a conversation I had online earlier today with two other Railsers. It is going to be typeset prettily and pinned to the wall behind me and my partner on this project.

And yes, we are both using the exact same version of IE, right down to the millionth decimal and little spatters of text indicating the XP service pack revision. (I’d never really thought it possible to make unusable version numbers before, but Microsoft proves, once again, that you can achieve anything if you just try hard enough.)

Reminder: Coming to the smaller, cuddlier Rails conference in Canada? You should. I’ll be giving an introductory talk on Ajax in Rails, which you can follow up by attending Thomas Fuchs’ advanced talk.